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A retrofit in an old brick building had me chasing a ground fault for two days
I was adding a wireless sensor network to a 1920s bank building in Omaha, and every single glass break detector kept showing a tamper fault. It turned out the original steel window frames, still grounded to something in the walls, were creating a floating ground that interfered with the new system's common. Has anyone else run into interference from historic building materials like this?
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the_claire1mo ago
My buddy had a similar thing with old iron pipes messing with his alarm system.
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singh.harper7d ago
Holy crap, steel window frames from the 1920s still grounded to something? That's wild. I wouldn't have even thought to check for that kind of floating ground.
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phoenix_martin401mo ago
Heard about a guy trying to install a smart thermostat in a pre-war apartment. The thing kept losing connection and rebooting randomly. They finally traced it back to the old, unshielded knob-and-tube wiring in the walls. It was putting out enough electrical noise to scramble the thermostat's wireless signal. He had to run a whole new dedicated line just to get the thing to work right.
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