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I finally figured out why my panel installs kept failing inspection in Tucson, and it was the dumbest thing
Been doing alarm installs for 11 years and I always prided myself on clean work, but last spring I failed 3 inspections in a row on 4 different homes in Tucson and could not figure out why. The inspector kept flagging my zone wiring and I kept arguing with him because everything looked fine to me. Then one day he walked me back to the panel and pointed at my wire nuts and said "you stripped these too short, look at the copper." I had been cutting and stripping wires with a dull stripper for like 2 years without even thinking about it, so half my connections had tiny bits of nicked copper and some were barely making contact. Ordered a $28 Klein stripper the same day and went back and redid every single connection in those 4 panels, passed all of them on the next walk through. It just blew my mind that the whole problem was a 6 inch piece of copper I was too cheap to look at. Anybody else get tripped up by something that basic and not catch it for way too long?
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olivere3014d ago
Man I felt this in my soul because I did almost the exact same thing with my coax crimper a few years back. The die in it had worn down so every fitting I crimped was just loose enough to cause callbacks, and I probably did 40 jobs before a buddy watched me terminate one and started laughing. I kept blaming the cheap splitters and the old cable runs when the whole time it was a worn out tool I refused to replace because it still "worked". Bought a new crimper for like 35 bucks and all my signal problems disappeared overnight. It's wild how we convince ourselves the expensive problems must have complicated causes when usually it's just one dumb little thing we stopped paying attention to. The worst part is how long we defend ourselves to the inspector or the customer instead of just looking at our own hands. Glad you got it sorted, those walk through passes must have felt amazing after three fails in a row.
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