OK, so a new client has a very puzzling problem. Their doorbell stopped working. I went underneath the house to find the transformer and wiring: found *nothing*. Nothing in that crawlspace but phone wiring and some (new, Romex) power cabling. Oh, and some old thermostat wiring, but that's it.
The house is wood-framed stucco, built somewhere in the 1920s-30s, very standard construction, mostly one story but with several levels (on a hillslope). It's a quality-built home with nice architectural features.
I looked inside the one crawlspace opening into the attic, which is at the back of the house: it goes basically nowhere. There's a wall directly in front of the opening that prevents me from getting into the section of roof where the doorbell wiring might be. The rest of the crawlspace is too small to even get into, unless one is a midget.
Which leads me to believe that, since I cannot see *any* wiring below the house, everything associated with the doorbell--transformer and wiring--must be above the ceiling of the living room, which is where the front door and the doorbell are. But there is absolutely no access into this space, either inside our outside the house. The closet right behind the doorbell has nothing in it, except the alarm system which was added a long time after the house was built. The doorbell itself is original, so I'm assuming the doorbell wiring was installed when the house was built.
I always thought that doorbell transformers needed to be accessible, both for safety reasons and for possible replacement. But if this is true, this one can never be replaced, at least without tearing open the ceiling.
I'm advising the client to just get a wireless doorbell for now. But this bugs me. Has anyone else here run into a similar situation?