How to Troubleshoot Your Panel, and When to Call in the Big Guns
It’s Friday. You’re excited because the day is almost done, and you’ve just about wrapped up your work when your focus is rudely shattered by the dreaded beep. It’s enough to make you want to fire back a few choice bleeps of your own. Why is your panel in trouble now, and what can you do to fix it?
Possible Reasons Why It’s Beeping
Low Battery
This is almost as easy as replacing the batteries in your TV remote. The battery is typically located inside the alarm panel cabinet. Once you locate the battery, match the voltage and the amp hour rating, and you can order a replacement battery online or search for a local store that carries one. Sealed lead acid batteries are utilized in many industries, including alarm systems. Once you have your battery, unplug the leads from the old one and attach to the new one. The panel will recharge this new battery. Your job is done. Of course, if you’d prefer us to replace the low battery, we’re more than happy to do so.
Open Circuit
This happens when a point on the system fails to return the proper voltage. This could be caused by a loose or broken wire, loose or broken resistor, or a defective device. Unless you have previous experience troubleshooting electrical circuits, it’s a good idea to call us.
Ground Fault
Electricity wants to find the shortest path possible to the ground, literally the dirt under your feet. A ground fault can happen anywhere along a wire path. Years of building movement can cause a wire to rub against a metal edge and eventually cause the copper in the wire to short to that metal. Now instead of the electricity traveling from the panel to the device, it is now being intercepted by that metal and traveling through the building to earth ground, which is usually a grounding rod just outside the building, pushed deep into the dirt.
In this case, it’s best to call us, so we can pinpoint the location of the ground fault.
Communication Failure
Communication has changed drastically in the last 20 years. Hardwired phone lines are becoming rare, and wireless communication is constantly changing and upgrading. In our experience, comm failures, are often caused by the network provider upgrading cell towers. It’s annoying, we know, but it’s also the nature of technology. As soon as you replace your 2G communicator with a 3G unit, they are already installing 4G equipment, or is it 5G? Occasionally, obsolescence isn’t the issue. The alarm panel might require a simple power cycle. Yes, unplug it, then plug it back in. This requires disconnecting the main power and the backup battery both, then reconnecting the main power, then the battery, in that order. If this is something you’re not comfortable with, we are happy to help troubleshoot the cause of your communication failure.
A/C Power Failure
There are only a handful of causes for this. The most likely: a power outage. If this is the case, you know what to do. Wait.
If the alarm system is the only thing with this problem, you can check the circuit breaker if you know which circuit the panel is using. Some panels are hardwired directly to the electrical circuit (not plugged into an outlet), so unless you have a multimeter, you will have a hard time determining whether voltage is actually present on the circuit on these setups. For the systems that use a wall-plug transformer, if the outlet does have voltage, it could be that the transformer has gone to the big Radio Shack in the sky. One can order transformers like this in all types to replace the bad one, but if you aren’t comfortable with this, we would love to help.
The Panel Has Gone Crazy
This does happen. The alarm panel might require a simple power cycle. Unplug it, then plug it back in. This requires disconnecting the main power and the backup battery both, then reconnecting the main power, then the battery, in that order. If this is something you’re uncomfortable with, we are happy to come troubleshoot the cause of your panel’s descent into madness.
Don’t let your beeping panel ruin your Friday night! Try troubleshooting it yourself or give us call!
