We are soon to refurbish one bedroom on the first floor which currently has a grotty built in wardrobe that has got to come out. I started to remove the hanging rail and was intruiged to see a small white cable stapled to the carcase just by the door. The cable comes up through the floor and disappears up through the ceiling into the loft. Checking out the loft is not as easy as it used to be as we had a loft conversion done 5 years ago so it is all neatly boarded out with T&G and any wires that were there before are well and truly covered over.
I've been racking my brains as to what the cable could be for and it soon became aparent that it could only be the cable running from the alarm control box up to the sounder box on the front gable.
Horrors, as I recall that when the builder was doing the loft conversion, he had to re-route the cable to the sounder and as soon as he cut it the b***dy alarm went off - even though he had disconnected the backup battery.
It transpires that most alarms have a big capacitor in the sounder box. This activates the sounder if the alarm is tampered with eg having the cables cut or the cover removed. I seem to recall that it took about an hour before the capacitor drained down. I wasnt too popular with the neighbours.
Question now, as you might expect, is how does one get round this as the cable has to be cut and extended so that it can re re-routed?