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Spent 3 hours chasing a ground fault on a 16 zone panel and it was the stupid zone 7 wire
Had a rough one last Thursday at a house out in Fairview. New install, 16 zones, and zones 1 through 15 armed up fine but zone 7 kept showing a fault no matter what I did. I swapped the reed switch, checked the resistor, even ran a temp jumper straight to the can, nothing. Turned out the drywall guys nicked the wire behind the baseboard and it was shorting to the stud, but of course it tested clean when I metered it from the panel. Anyone got a trick for finding a partial short like that without ripping out half the wall?
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xena76715d ago
How old is the wire run and did you try a megger on it? A plain multimeter at the panel won't show a high resistance short to a stud, but a megger will light it up because it pushes real voltage through and the nick arcs over. I had one just like yours where the reading looked fine on the meter but the megger pegged it, then I used a tone probe along the wall and could hear the signal change right where the drywall screw was. If you don't have a megger, an insulation tester rental for a day is way cheaper than cutting open a wall you didn't need to open.
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