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That Tuesday in Tacoma where every panel went haywire at once
Last month I had a service route up near Tacoma, and by 9 AM I got three separate trouble calls for keypad lockouts on DSC panels within a mile of each other. Turns out a utility crew fried a shared transformer and the backup batteries couldn't hold steady voltage, so every zone went into a false alarm cycle. I spent 6 hours swapping power supplies and reprogramming, but my van stock only had two and I had to drive 40 minutes for the third. Any of you ever deal with a cascade failure from one grid hiccup, or was this just my cursed week?
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daniel_cooper343d ago
Three lockouts on DSC gear inside a mile, that pattern points to one bad neutral or ground on the transformer feed, not the batteries alone. I ran into the same thing in Puyallup two winters back, a poco crew swapped a can and the shared neutral got loose, and we had beeping panels for a week until their lineman came back and found it. The batteries in those cans never stand up to a floating voltage, they will sag and throw faults way before they hit low batt. Swapping power supplies fixes it for an hour, then the same zones trip again, and you end up chasing your tail. Did you put a meter on the line side before you changed anything, or did the poco admit the ground was bad?
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