More confessions of a security installer...

[black knight]

In my installation days (which was pre-SDS ), i can remember doing a shop in Scarborough and whilst drilling through a wall succeeded in making a a rather large hole instead of the cable size hole i wanted. (Thats what happens when you forget to turn hammer action off before you finish!! ).

i fixed this my putting a 24 way jb there!!

[CompostCORNER]

Well, besides an incident where a customers prize cat vanished under the floor boards, the only good one I can think about right now is this.................

Picture this. A brand new house. Customer not moved in yet. No carpets, no furniture. Basically, the whole house was empty.

The alarm itself needed extra wiring due to the couple being deaf. Strobes in the bedroom and around the house to indicate when the alarm was active. But at the end of the day, it all went in perfectly. Installed back in the days when I installed alarms and stuff all by myself.

Anyways, approximately 10 months later, the alarm started to false. So I was despatched to investigate.

Zone 2 PIR was a simple SRP200 by Crow installed in the kitchen. These detectors are pretty reliable. They actually do pick up movement unlike the SRP 800's we had used on a previous site. These seemed very sluggish.

So, the alarm was falsing regularly and upon closer inspection of the offending PIR, I found that the customer had installed coving around the kitchen.

So what? I hear you ask. Well, the customer had installed the coving and stopped the coving either side of the PIR. This meant that any cracks between the ceiling and the top of the walls were now hidden inside the coving. Any draughts through these cracks were now trapped inside the coving cavity and would travel the entire length of the coving, emerging at the gap where the PIR was. Lets just say that there was sufficient wind to blow out my lighter the instant I moved it in front of the PIR.

So, my job???? Simply drop the PIR a miniscule 3.5 inches and instruct the customer to complete the coving, closing the gap. Well, upon dropping the PIR, I drilled my first hole. And unfortunately, it went straight through one of those blue PVC hose pipes embedded in the wall that served the radiator below. No pipe tracer in the world would have detected this pipe. And even looking at the radiator this pipe served, I would have thought that running diagonally across the wall as this did would have been out of the question.

Picture the scene. I'm up the top of my steps. The customer is doing the pots in the sink slightly to the right of the corner I'm working in. And I drill through the central heating pipe.

I stick my finger in the hole. Scalding/poaching the end as the red hot water seeps out. The plaster slowly desolving, I'm shouting to the customer but if you've read all this post, you'll know that although she is doing the pots, she is stone deaf. Here I am, screaming and waving to get her attention as the wall disentigrates around my boiled finger.

It felt like many minutes passed until she turned around. Probably just out of curiosity to see how I was getting on. Then she saw my red pulsating fingure stuck in the wall, a jet of semi-boiling water spurting from her wall and she realised what had happened. Her face dropped and she handed me some kitchen roll and a tea towel.

So, things were now moving. Luckily, further up the road, the estate was still being built so I bunged the leaking hole that was now the size of a tennis ball, with the customers tea-towel and ran out the house and collared the plumber. He immediately responded and emptied the central heating system then went back to his van. After finishing his tea break, he returned and fixed the leak. Refilled the central heating and theres me thinking I was luckly due to the plumber still being on site. Surely £70 tops, I found out the hard way that plumbers can be nasty members of society. Especially after he sent my boss a bill for £250. Extortionate or what lol.

Ironically, expecting a bill from the customer for the damage to the wallpaper, she told us she had some left over wallpaper that covered it quite nicely and no charge was expected. Fantastic people. Why isn't the world full of people like this?

My only error that involved water in nearly 10 years of installing but total respect to the customer for not taking advantage of the situation. And more of my faith in the plumbing industry down the bog due to the extortionate price for a simple pipe fix.

Tony

[CompostCORNER]

lol, nice touch. A nice K980 piccy for each time i write the word P.I.R..

Hopefully, I got away with that last PIR lol.

[Guest]

So am I to take all these posts that it is inevitable that one day im going to drill straight through a pipe then

[Guest]

I remember nicking a pipe under a floor once, can't quite remember how exactly. I think it involved a 10mm auger bit and\or a circular saw but I managed to avoid the costly callout due to the fact that my Dad, a plumbing and heating engineer, happened to be working two doors away!

[CompostCORNER]

So am I to take all these posts that it is inevitable that one day im going to drill straight through a pipe then 

29568[/snapback]

I'll tell you what though. When I've worked with apprentices. Come to think about it, when I've worked with anyone, I've always told them that I have 'The Force' lol.

In 10 years, 1 pipe and maybe 3 mains cables is pretty good going. Ok. All that in over 1000 installs then. Sounds better now lol.

Seriously though, arrogance will be ones undoing. But confidence will be ones saviour. Theres people here at Sentry Alarms in Hull who think I'm some sort of second coming. And all it boils down to is confidence. I take the tasks others pap their pants with.

I still pap my pants likes but I don't show it.

Whats the worst that can happen?

Thats how I look at things. If I worried too much about things, I'd never install anything. I'd be a waste of time and space.

Tony

[Steve K]

It's always better to drill from the inside out (after checking below of course!).

Despite intricate measuring on an old cornish cottage, I drilled from the outside in, and my 1 metre sds drill bit went straight into the hot water cylinder.

Why do these things always happen at the end of the day?

Ever tried getting a plumber that time of day in the middle of Cornwall?

Eventually I did, and he was a 'proper old fashioned plumber' (about 114yrs old), and saved my bacon and repaired it by soldering a piece of copper over it! £40 instead of a new cyclinder - ideal!

Customer wasn't bothered as she was renting!

I was very bothered initially!

[Guest Cable Guy]

So am I to take all these posts that it is inevitable that one day im going to drill straight through a pipe then 

29568[/snapback]

Yes, there are only those of us who have and those of us who will. The worst one's are them that hiss and after 2 seconds still no water i quit smoking after the 2nd one

[CompostCORNER]

Doesn't have to be a pipe.

I remember drilling out a bellbox cable at roughly the oprecise moment that the 'Belmont' transmitter conked out killing BBC1 and 2 TV.

The customer was in the mood for some serious fisty-cuffs saying it was my fault he couldn't watch Dallas.

Some 8 years ago you see. Anyways, this chap thought I'd blown his mains and TV arieal cable until he realised ITV and C4 was working OK AFTER he switched his telly over.

Guilty until proven otherwise. lol.

I've even been blamed for breaking someones water pipes whilst drilling when the Yorkshie Water came to fix a leak. Of course, It was all my fault wasn't It? They turned the full street off. Funny thing is, until I went outside and found out what was going on, I believed it was all my fault too.

Tony

[Deltaseven]

Yep - I have apparrently managed to bring down an entire corporate IT network whilst carrying out routine maintenance on a panel. Site manager was having a right go at me (and I was pleading ignorance!!) when the IT guy came up and told him some piece of networking equipment had gone down. Didn't even get an apology...