Bad Alarm Installation Pictures

[emaillogins@xxxxxxxxx]

Hey All,

20 year alarm professional here. I am helping put together a low
voltage course at an inner-city trade school that will include security
/ fire. I'm looking for pictures of bad installations. Nothing private
labled, I don't want to harpoon any particular installation company.
But we all know that even the best companies can hire bad installers.

Wish I thought of this years ago. The stuff I've seen, and fired techs
for.

Looking for things like resistors in the control, improper color codes
(wrong wires for pos & neg), non-fire wire for smokes, a rate of rise
in the attic, crooked devices, smoke detector in the garage, bad cable
runs, staples in the wires, using a T-18 on Coax, firewire running
diagonally across the dining room ceiling...

You get the idea. I've seen all of those, and many more.

My fav was a service call because of no monitoring station response
from an alarm.
The phoneline was wired to the motion sensor. The phoneline never made
it to the panel. 4 cond wire ran straight from the phone block to the
PIR. Yet the monitoring station had a full set of signals on
installation day.
The tech (using that word lightly) probably sent the sigs from his
house prior to install. I do not wish to speak evil of the dead, but
Emergency Networks was the pioneer of "slap 'em in, and run like hell
with the signed monitoring contract, and sell it to whoever is paying
the most that day". Installers were paid piecework & commission. 4 one
man installs in a day were not uncommon.

Emergency Networks was the same company that pretty much bankrupted the
Alert Center, with the volume of contracts they sold them, with very
high attrition rate. No credit checks back then.

Anyways, if someone could point me in the right direction for some
really great pictures of horrible installs, it would be very much
appreciated. Does not need to be limited to security, could be cable
TV, satellite, anything low voltage.

Thanks for your time,
Bill