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Spent a full day chasing a false call on a 20-story office building

Got a call for a car stopping a foot high at the top floor in a building downtown. The logs showed a door zone fault, so I spent hours checking the sill, the vane, the detector, you name it. Replaced the detector, adjusted the sill, still kept faulting. After about 7 hours, I finally traced the main traveling cable up the hoistway and found a tiny, almost invisible rub mark on one wire. The insulation was worn just enough to short against the steel when the car hit that exact spot. My boss looked at it and said, 'Sometimes the machine tells you the wrong story.' Had to splice in a new section. Anyone else get thrown off by a fault code that pointed you in the wrong direction?
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3 Comments
victor_ward
Always check the traveling cable for rubs FIRST, it saves so much time.
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the_tyler
the_tyler23d ago
Yeah, "the machine tells you the wrong story" is so true. I read a forum post once where a guy chased a comms error for days and it was just a chewed wire in the pit.
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leerobinson
How many days did that poor guy waste on that chewed wire?
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