PSA: Reached 500 panels wired and realized I'd been making the same dumb mistake on about 20 of them

Elliot Gibson · 2026-10-17T00:55:04.774307+00:00

I keep a running tally in my truck notebook and hit panel number 500 on Tuesday while doing a small job in Reno. Flipping back through the pages I noticed something ugly: on roughly 20 of those jobs I zip tied the zone wires too close to the transformer, which is exactly where I keep finding phantom faults later. The weird part is I only caught it because a helper asked why I always left that little gap near the can. Took me 500 installs to figure out a basic habit I should have had from panel one. Any of you keep a count of your installs, and did hitting a number ever show you a pattern you hated? I'm wondering if I should go back and check the older sites or just fix it going forward.

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PSA: Reached 500 panels wired and realized I'd been making the same dumb mistake on about 20 of them | Alarm System Installers - Thought Shares