Just spent 4 hours on a false alarm call that was a $2 fuse

Ran a service call in Tacoma yesterday for a DSC panel that kept tripping the dialer. Customer swore it was a broken motion sensor, so I swapped that out first, wasted 90 minutes. Then I checked the transformer, the battery, even the keypad bus voltage, all fine. Turned out the bell fuse on the main board was cracked but not blown, intermittent short every time the siren pulsed. Four hours total, and the fix was a 2 dollar fuse, I felt like an idiot. Has anyone else had a tiny part eat up a whole day like that, or do you have a faster way to test fuses under load?

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1 Comment

price.tara11d ago

I mean, four hours on a $2 fuse sounds rough, but is it really that bad? Panels do weird stuff, and you probably saved the customer a whole new board. Maybe it's just me, but I'd take a cheap fix over a $400 part any day.