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That talk with an old fire marshal changed how I wire keypads
Last Tuesday I was pulling wire for a DSC system at a house in Omaha, and the fire marshal showed up early for inspection. He told me I was running my keypad wires way too close to the high voltage lines in the attic, said it causes false alarms all the time. Never really thought about it before but he was right, I always just ran stuff the fastest way. Anyone else have an inspector point out something you'd been doing wrong for years?
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miller.avery16d ago
Respectfully, I've never had issues with that and I think interference is more about a bad ground than proximity.
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allen.cole16d ago
The 3 feet of separation rule is in the code book for a reason. I used to run keypad wires right next to romex all the time and wondered why I kept getting service calls for ghost keypad beeps. A cheap inductive amp clamp showed me 12 volts of noise bleeding into my signal wires after I rerouted them. Bad ground can make it worse but proximity is the real root cause in most residential attics. Try moving just one wire run 3 feet away and see if those phantom alerts stop.
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