The Panel That Went Silent After the Phone Switch

Why this matters

For eight days a monitored house was not monitored. The panel armed, the keypad beeped, the siren would have sounded, and nothing would have reached the central station, because the homeowner had moved to internet phone service and the installer from the phone company had disconnected the house wiring the panel dialed out on. The station noticed only when the account's late-to-test timer expired, and that timer had been set years earlier for a weekly test the panel no longer sent. Nothing on site was broken. The failure was in two records nobody had reconciled, and the fix was as much about the dealer's account settings as about the house.

The notice that started it

On the morning of March 13 the dealer's service queue received a late-to-test notice from the central station for one account. A late-to-test notice means the station's software expected a periodic test signal from the panel by a set time and did not get one. The office called the homeowner, who said the alarm was working fine; she had armed it that morning.

That was true, and it was the problem. Arming is local. Whether the station hears anything is a separate question.

The station's side of the record

The service manager pulled the account's event history from the station.

 ACCOUNT EVENT HISTORY, CENTRAL STATION (excerpt)
 602 = periodic test report (Contact ID)

 DATE    TIME   EVENT                  PATH
 Mar 01  03:14  602 periodic test      phone line
 Mar 02  03:14  602 periodic test      phone line
 Mar 03  03:15  602 periodic test      phone line
 Mar 04  03:14  602 periodic test      phone line
 Mar 05  03:14  602 periodic test      phone line
   (no signals of any kind received)
 Mar 13  03:15  LATE TO TEST           station
                expected interval 8 days
 Mar 13  07:58  notice to dealer queue

The codes are Contact ID, the reporting format published as SIA DC-05, where 602 is a periodic test report. See related: Reading Event Codes on a Signal History.

The panel tested daily. Five consecutive tests at 03:14 or 03:15. The panel's timer test was set to report every 24 hours.

The last signal was the early morning of March 5. Nothing after that, not a test, not an opening or closing, not an alarm. Tests were due on March 6 through March 13, eight in all, and none arrived.

The station waited eight days. The account's expected test interval at the station was 8 days. When the account was first set up, years before, the panel had tested weekly, and the station's interval had been set to a week plus one day of grace. At some later service visit the panel was changed to test daily. Nobody changed the station's interval to match, so a panel that went silent was treated as healthy for seven more days than it should have been.

The house's side of the record

The tech went out that morning. Before touching anything he called the station, placed the account on test, and had the operator confirm the window. With no working path the panel could not send a signal, but the work he was about to do would restore one, and the first signal on a restored path is often a burst of stored events the station should not act on. See related: How to Put an Alarm Account on Test and Take It Off.

The panel's own event log filled in the rest:

• March 5, 14:22: phone line trouble. The panel's telephone line monitor (TLM), which watches the voltage on the line it dials out on, saw the line drop out.
• March 6, 03:14: communication failure. The panel tried to send its daily test, failed its attempts, and logged it.
• March 6, 07:05: trouble acknowledged at the keypad.
• March 6 onward: a failure to communicate logged every morning at the test time, each followed by an acknowledgment within a few hours.

The homeowner remembered. The phone company's installer had come on the afternoon of March 5 to move her to internet phone service. The keypad had started beeping that afternoon. She pressed the key that silenced it, as she had done with low-battery beeps before, and the beeping came back each morning and she silenced it again. She had no reason to connect it to the installer.

What the installer had done

The old service came in as a copper pair to the network interface on the outside wall. From there, the alarm installer years ago had run the line first to a line-seizure jack beside the panel, so the panel could take the line from the house phones when it needed to dial, then on to the house phone jacks. That is the standard arrangement for a panel's digital communicator, which dials the station and sends its report as tones over the phone line.

The internet phone service came in through the cable modem. The installer plugged a phone adapter into the modem and plugged the kitchen phone into the adapter. To stop the old copper service from interfering, he disconnected the house wiring at the network interface. The house phone jacks went dead except the one with the adapter, and so did the line feeding the panel's seizure jack. From that moment the panel had nothing to dial out on. The TLM saw it within minutes, which is exactly what it is there for.

Why reconnecting the house wiring was not the fix

Some technicians in this spot backfeed the phone adapter into the house wiring so every jack and the panel get dial tone again. It can work on the bench and it is not a fix to leave behind.

The signal path is not built for it. A digital communicator's reports are tones sent over the line. An internet phone service compresses voice audio, and compression that is fine for speech can distort the tones enough that the station's receiver rejects the report. Some reports get through, some fail, and the pattern changes when the service provider changes its equipment.

It dies with the modem. The adapter and the modem run on house power. In a power cut the panel switches to its battery and the phone path goes away with the modem, which is the moment a burglar or a storm is most likely to matter.

The customer did not choose it. The homeowner moved to internet phone service to save money on phone service, not to rebuild her alarm path. Leaving her with a path that fails unpredictably is a decision she should be offered, not one made for her.

The dealer's standard for any account that loses its landline is a cellular communicator, which sends signals over the cellular network on its own radio and keeps working on the panel's battery when house power is out. See related: How to Upgrade a Landline Panel to a Cellular Communicator, and Cellular Backup and Alarm Communicators.

The call before the install

The tech did not start the upgrade on his own authority. It changes the equipment and usually the monitoring plan, so the homeowner decided. He explained it in the kitchen in about three minutes.

 TECH: Your alarm has not been able to reach the
       monitoring center since the phone change on
       the 5th. The beeping was the panel telling
       you. It still sounds the siren, but nobody
       is called.
 CUSTOMER: For eight days?
 TECH: Yes. Our center should have flagged it
       sooner, and that is our setting to fix,
       not something you did wrong.
 CUSTOMER: What do I need?
 TECH: A cellular communicator. It talks to the
       center over the cell network and keeps
       working in a power cut. About an hour to
       fit and test today.

Saying plainly that the eight-day gap was partly the dealer's own setting mattered. The customer silenced a beep, which customers do. The dealer left a station interval a week longer than the panel's test cycle, which was within the dealer's control.

The install and the proof

With the account still on test, the tech fitted the cellular communicator to the panel per its instructions and the sibling procedure. Before choosing the mounting point he checked the cellular signal reading the communicator reported at the panel location, a basement corner, and found it adequate. In a basement with a weak reading the communicator or its antenna goes higher in the building, with the signal reading checked again before the panel is closed.

He programmed the panel to report through the cellular path, kept the daily test, and disabled the TLM trouble on the dead phone line so the keypad would stop beeping at a line that no longer existed. He did not leave a dead line selected as a reporting path.

Then he proved it:

• A test report sent from the keypad: the station operator confirmed a 602 received over the cellular path.
• An alarm on a door zone with the system armed: confirmed received, with the correct zone.
• AC power unplugged at the panel's transformer for two minutes, then a second test report: confirmed received over cellular on battery. AC was restored and the panel's AC trouble cleared.

Only after those confirmations did he ask the station to take the account off test, and he confirmed with the operator that the account was back in normal service.

The setting that made it eight days

Back at the office, the service manager changed the account's expected test interval at the station to match the panel's daily test, with a small grace period so a single delayed test did not generate a notice. Had that been set correctly, the late-to-test notice would have reached the dealer on the morning of March 6, about seven days earlier, before silencing the keypad had become a daily habit.

Then she ran a report across the dealer's whole book: every account whose station test interval was longer than its panel's programmed test cycle. The panel's cycle lives in the panel and in the account notes, the station's interval lives at the station, and the two drift apart whenever a tech changes one at a visit and not the other. The report found 31 accounts, which went onto a correction list with each one checked against the panel programming before the station setting changed.

She also pulled a second list: accounts still reporting only over a landline. Those customers are each one phone-company visit away from this same week, and an outbound call telling them so costs far less than the next late notice.

References

• See related: How to Upgrade a Landline Panel to a Cellular Communicator
• See related: Cellular Backup and Alarm Communicators
• See related: How to Put an Alarm Account on Test and Take It Off
• See related: Reading Event Codes on a Signal History
• SIA DC-05, Contact ID reporting format, for event codes such as 602