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Hot take: using a baby monitor to hear the hoistway saved my bacon last Thursday

I was working on a 6-floor install in an old building downtown and kept hearing a weird scraping noise from the top of the shaft but could never catch it on the rope. After 3 trips up and down the ladder I grabbed my kid's old VTech monitor from the car, aimed the parent unit at the hoistway, and set the baby unit on the machine room floor. Dead quiet in there but I walked down to the lobby and heard that scraping clear as day through the receiver. Turns out a loose guide rail bracket was rubbing on the cab roof every time it passed the 4th floor. The building super thought I lost it when he saw me holding a baby monitor, but it saved me about 2 hours of climbing and guessing. Has anyone else used some weird gadget for troubleshooting that actually worked?

3 comments

3 Comments

casey81813d ago

Huh, that's pretty clever. How far away from the machine room were you when you could still hear the scraping through the baby monitor?

karen_carter13d ago

Not as far as I'd like, to be honest. I got maybe two doors down before the baby monitor started picking up the neighbors' cat meowing and I realized I'd just been standing there holding a receiver full of static like an idiot. The whole point was to see if the thing actually had range, but instead I just confirmed my block has a very vocal orange tabby. By the time I got back to the machine room, the scraping had stopped and I couldn't tell if that was a win or if I'd just missed my shot at hearing something actually interesting. I guess that's a long way of saying I'm not cut out for surveillance work unless the subject is a malfunctioning toy.

kellygrant13d ago

Maybe half a block, before the neighbors started giving me looks.