Phonewatch - no power - what happens ?

zagmund

Short term issue here. We have builders in doing renovation work and today was their day to cut power to the building and run a few of their own circuits for building.

This means power is lost to the alarm box. Presumably the battery will work for a while and eventually give out. I'm not worried about security on the house, but I am worried about the external box going off when the battery runs out at 0350 tomorrow morning. The neighbours will not be happy.

Quick questions -
1) Will the external box go off when all power is lost ?
2) Is there a way to tell the entire alarm system to just shut down and forget about everything for the next 5 months ?

Thanks,

z

KoolKid

zagmund wrote: »

Quick questions -
1) Will the external box go off when all power is lost ?

Yes, if there is a live working external bell. In a lot of cases Eircom only fit a dummy box outside.

zagmund wrote: »

2) Is there a way to tell the entire alarm system to just shut down and forget about everything for the next 5 months ?

If the outside bell does ring it will stop after about 20 minutes. Disconnect the mains power to the panel & it will remain powered down.

zagmund

Cool - thanks. Of course, it makes sense - if the power is gone then there will be no way for the bell to ring and there will be no way for the alarm system to be active.

Thanks,

z

KoolKid

Your welcome. If you have any problems powering it back up give us a shout.

Thunderbird2

zagmund wrote: »

Cool - thanks. Of course, it makes sense - if the power is gone then there will be no way for the bell to ring and there will be no way for the alarm system to be active.

Thanks,

z

If it is a live working bell
You'll have to open it and disconnect the back up battery or it will ring for 20 mins when the main power fails ..it might ring for only 3 minutes as PW don't like using external bells and might have it setup this way

zagmund

Update . . .

We rang eircom and they said more or less the same as above. Funny enough, they had to ask me if I had a real bell or not. Given that they fitted it (for the previous owner of the house, not me) I had kind of assumed they would know this.

I'm not unduly impressed with their customer service. I rang them about 1900 on that evening to explain the situation. They weren't able to tell me what would happen when the battery eventually gave up the ghost. In so many words the answer was "you will have to wait till the technical guys come in tomorrow morning and they will tell you" . . . at which point it was all going to be a bit moot as the battery was likely to be dead, and the neighbours already irate. As it happens this didn't happen, but it could have. I had thought that they could have called in to the system and just turned it all off in a controlled manner, but they said they couldn't. I find it really hard to believe they don't have this level of remote access.

Subsequent to this, they rang at about 2200 that night to say "your battery is reporting is low and discharging" . . . which wasn't really a surprise since I rang them earlier to say "my battery is low and discharging"

And then to top it all off they rang through our call list twice around midnight to say the alarm had been triggered. Now, it's possible that someone waited several years until the house was entirely empty without so much as a light bulb in it to decide to knock off the windows and set the alarm off, but if I was a gambling man I would say that was the last dying gasp of the alarm battery having one last bit of fun.

z

KoolKid

They should have been able to tell you whether they had fitted a live bell or not.
They should also have been able to tell you what happens if the system is powered down. Wait for the technical staff??
Every company has engineers on call 24 hours..
They were right about one thing. They would not have remote control or access into the system.

Thunderbird2

Can the Simon panels not be remotely accessed over a phone line ? Maybe it's only in the states

KoolKid

Not by Eircom. Its not something any monitoring station would be doing.

altor

Thunderbird2 wrote: »

Can the Simon panels not be remotely accessed over a phone line ? Maybe it's only in the states

Yes it can be.

Thunderbird2

That's good to know

altor

Thunderbird2 wrote: »

That's good to know

More control if you have the toolbox