Saw a guy wire a DSC panel with speaker wire yesterday

Was doing a swap out at a condo complex in Tampa and noticed the old system was all wired with 18 gauge speaker wire. Door contacts, motions, even the keypad bus. I could not believe it held up for 7 years without a single false alarm. The homeowner said his brother in law did the install for free. Makes you wonder how much stuff out there is held together by luck more than skill. Any of you run into some real hack jobs on service calls?

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casey39329d ago

I read somewhere that speaker wire has a thicker jacket so it actually holds up better in walls than the cheap solid core stuff people use for alarms, but the resistance is totally wrong for power and data so it's a miracle it worked at all lol. Seven years without a false alarm though that's wild. Probably the copper was good enough to carry the voltage and the contacts were just clean enough to close the circuits. Still though that brother in law must have had a box of speaker wire lying around and just went for it. I've seen way worse honestly, like someone using phone cable for a 12v siren and wondering why it melted. Luck is definitely doing most of the heavy lifting in this industry sometimes.