Alarm man says no power to the alarm. Electrician says they can't understand this.

[Mr. Clueless]

With all the power cuts in Lancashire recently our alarm was sounding off during the night. I pulled wires trying to shut it up & took out fuses but obviously (now) this didn't work. I then put these wires & such back. Or at least i'm 99% sure i did.

Check again & there's 2 blue wires with exposed ends although i don't remember taking any blue wires out at all.

Power came & went, came & went. After a few days the bell box was making noise along the lines of electrical interference. Not enough for the street to hear but if you stood at our front door you could. This eventually stopped. The lights on the PIR sensors inside no longer lit up, the lights on the bell box no longer lit up & the lights on the control panel no longer lit up.

We had been having a lot of work going on in our living room, some of which was an electrician out to wire in new sockets while the floor was up. Old wiring was chopped, old junction boxes taken out as the joists were renewed & new put in place.

The alarm man came out & said there was no power to the alarm. It must be fed off the sockets circuit (which was off) & he can't do anything without power there.


The electrician came out some days later, wired in all the sockets but the alarm never lit up.

Electrician took a look at the wiring & said it's fed off the light circuit, not the socket circuit.

I've also removed the trunking to find that the only wire running up from the floor area is the old telephone extension cable that i snipped. No other wire from down there.

However since the first time the electrician was out, my wife (i simply don't touch electrics) said that something was different. Fuses that used to control some things no longer control them & the whole setup is different (which i will post in the electrics forum after i have tea because it's bamboozled me & i'm going to need to note down all the combinations).

So in short, so far are you able to determine why the alarm is not working / has no power? Or do you need the information from the electrics thread i'll be posting (i'll post in this thread when i've posted that thread)?

 

[sparkymarka]

First thing to check or get checked , is there 240 AC to the control panel , if not get electrian back.

 

[Mr. Clueless]

I'm going to look like a big dummy now but how do i check that?

Is this where you talk about multimeters & i get a glazed look on my face?

I only say multimeters because when i generally ask electrical questions that term comes up a lot. In which case there may be one at my mums & if there is, what do i actually do with it?

 

[secureiam]

you start testing for power.

alarms get power from the mains and from the back up battery.(the odd panel all batteries no mains).

from the mains it should be spur off to an unswitched fused spur, so do you get 240V to the fused spur. (if no need a sparky, if the consumer unit hasn't tripped, if it has tripped you can reset it)
then does that 240V get to the panels mains fuse. (competent person, sparky or alarm engineer usually, and in your case I would say not you as you don't appear to know what to do at all, and fiddling with mains can kill).
then does the power come out of the transformer or switch mode power supply
then does the power get distributed around the alarms pcb and make each part of it function.

so saying they said no power, and its coming from wherever isn't really useful, it needs tracking down to find out at which point it is broken.

 

[Mr. Clueless]

My wife called the alarm guy who seemed pretty Pd off on the phone she said & again when he turned up (probably due to the sheer amount of calls he's had in recent weeks with these floods). It's probably best we wait a while & get him out again once he's calmed down.

Although with the electrician saying the alarm is on the lights circuit & with us now having issue with the lights as described here: //www.diynot.com/diy/threads/e...-out-riddle-inside-stiff-drink-needed.449108/ which we didn't have before....

I wouldn't be surprised if they're linked. To my electrical know-nothing mind i would say it's surely too much of a coincidence.

 

[secureiam]

given the other post the function has changed since the sparky did some changes, or did I read that wrong.

if that's the case I would get the sparky back to straighten up the issue.

I am not a sparky and wouldn't touch the system with a barge pole, the sparky has changed the function to the point that certain combinations means nothing works just isn't acceptable in my book.

To be fair I couldn't even begin to guess why they would have embarked on these changes either, doesn't make sense to me but I aint a sparky, so hopefully you'kll geta sparky to respond.

 

[secureiam]

just seen a reply that sums it up perfectly and the point of not waiting for the person to come back is a fair one.

sounds like you should be reporting the sparky for the work done incorrectly from the other thread.

 

[Mr. Clueless]

Thanks very much & yes you're correct - as i think about it, the bell box did stop making that electrical interference sound around the time the electrician came out.

 

[bernardgreen]

From this and your other post I would suggest you find a real electrician and not rely on the seemingly ignorant cable installer you have at the moment

 

[Spark123]

Like others have said, the first step is to make sure there is power at the alarm panel. I wouldn't be surprised if there was a blown fuse in the panel as the backup battery will have been absolutely flat, possibly to the point that you may need a new battery.
When the power first came back on the battery could have taken too much current and popped a fuse.

 

[PBC_1966]

Although with the electrician saying the alarm is on the lights circuit & with us now having issue with the lights as described here: //www.diynot.com/diy/threads/e...-out-riddle-inside-stiff-drink-needed.449108/ which we didn't have before....

I wouldn't be surprised if they're linked.

If the alarm was fed from the lighting circuit, then it's quite possible. You already have the problem of some light switches operating incorrectly due to whatever this "electrician" has done to mess up the wiring. Given that and allowing for the numerous ways in which the wiring can feed around the house to the various outlets, it's quite possible that the changes he made have also resulted in either the alarm being left with no power at all, or that it might only get power with a certain light switch (or combination of switches) in certain positions.

No offense intended so I hope you won't take any, but it's clear that to try and put this right by yourself is outside your capabilities at the present time, and you also have the potential for danger with the mess that the "electrician" left behind. It's time to get in somebody who knows what he's doing to sort it all out.