That old church job in Dayton changed my whole panel setup

Back in 2018 I had to rewire a 1970s church alarm in Dayton because the old system was a mess of spliced wires and dead zones. The place had three separate additions built at different times, and the original installer never labeled anything. We ended up running 14 zones and it took us 3 full days just to map where everything went. After that I started photographing every panel and writing the zone list on the inside cover with a sharpie. Has anyone else hit a building that made them change their standard install routine?

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dylanbell28d ago

My buddy Mike hit one of those old 1950s schools up in Akron where every classroom had its own homemade intercom box wired with lamp cord and tape. He spent a whole Saturday tracing one dead outlet back to a junction box that was buried behind a locker bay nobody had touched since the 70s. Took him two tries to figure out that the previous guy had used brown wire for hot and white for switched, which is just backwards. Now he labels every single wire with a p-touch before he even pulls the old stuff out, and he takes a video walkthrough of the whole building before he starts. He says that one job paid for the label maker a hundred times over.