Hello-- I had an ADT system installed in my home when I first moved in. Yeah yeah--I'm generally a DIYer, but my house is 100 years old and I was too busy to do all that fishing when I first moved in. Once I looked at the price of buying equipment myself, their deal was a steal for the amount of labor involved in fishing lines in my old house. It's an Ademco system. Well, I'm past my "90 day warranty" (it was installed during the winter), and now I have problems. We've been getting thunderstorms, and they ALWAYS set off the fire alarm. We even had the fire department come once when they couldn't reach us in time on the phone. The idiots at ADT told me that this is "normal" and "all alarms go off during electrical storms". But, since it's past my 90 days, they'll look at it for a minimum $120 service call! After this last storm when it went off 3 times, I looked at the panel to just fix the thing myself. The panel is powered by 2 power wires going to a non-ground wall transformer (2 plug). I looked at the screws on the board. One was labeled, "Earth Ground". For some odd reason, there was NO WIRE GOING TO IT! Just a resistor hanging off it (why, I don't know). I'm an electrical engineer, so this makes sense as a cause of my problems. If there's a surge, there's nowhere for the current to bleed off. So I hooked some heavy gauge wire to the Earth Ground and to my house ground. But I have to wait for the next storm to see if it works. Any other advice on protecting my system from having the fire alarm go off during storms? I also put a surge protector on it, but I doubt that will do much. I'd hate to have to buy a $1000 active UPS or SOLA CVS.

I have an inherited ADT Safewatch Pro system that has not been used since we bought our house two years ago. I recently decided to try to activate the system just for door opening detection and alarm without monitoring. The system is an ADT Safewatch Pro/Security Manager 10ADTEG/10ADTED. The main board is an SA142GENC board. When I plug in the main transformer, there is power to the circuit bus (connections 1 and 2) registering 19 V on my voltmeter. However, none of the other devices in the panel are getting power. Is there something else I should be checking?