Old church job in Dayton reminded me how much has changed

Ran a service call at a church in Dayton last week, the one off Wayne Ave with the brick steeple. They still had a 1989 Ademco panel wired with cloth jacket cable and three dialers stacked on the shelf, all dead. Felt weird swapping it out for a modern cellular unit, that old stuff was bulletproof but no one knows how to read a 4-wire loop anymore. Anyone else run into these antique setups and just take a minute before you tear them out?

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1 Comment

elliotm371mo ago

Wait, did you check the church's insurance paperwork before you pulled that old panel? A lot of these old buildings have policies that are written around those wired systems, and the second you swap in cellular, the coverage can get sketchy. I had a buddy in Columbus who did a similar swap at a parish and their liability guy threw a fit because the new unit had no battery backup rated for their fire zone. Not saying you should have left it, just that sometimes the "antique" is tied into legal stuff nobody thinks about till later. Also, that cloth jacket wire can be worth keeping if you ever need to trace a short, it holds up way better than the modern stuff in those old cinder block walls.