After a short in an outlet that is on the same circuit as the alarm system, OC appears on the keypad. Short was repaired. The fuse never tripped when the short occurred, I was replacing an outlet cover at the time. Have shut down all power and reset but nothing has changed. All other points on the circuit are working. The keypad accepts no commands. ready light is on and OC is constant. Any help would be appreciated.

 

According to the installation manual for this aged beast."
There is a fuse on the motherboard specifically for the console/keypad (furthest to the right in the row of 4 fuses), but that's for the power to the keypad, so you wouldn't get anything.

I would check the keypad connections on the back of the keypad and on the system motherboard. Assuming that the wires are routed in wall/attic spaces, it's very possible that this is just a coincidence that the two things happened about the same time.

The worst case is that short sent a spike that passed thru the system's power transformer and damaged the motherboard.

This is a very long out of production system. Short of a lucky find on an auction site, there's not a lot of sources for repair parts, especially since the Vector was one of the early adressable systems, and I'm not sure if the components are compatible with the current generation of addressable modules Honeywell/Ademco makes.

 

Actually you can upgrade your vector to a vista 50p but you will need to change the dip switches on the Points from 1-9 to a higher number. the vector used modules for all points instead on having the first 8 or 9 zones hardwired. the points are reusable on any panel that uses a 4208u module.





Paul

 

Ah! Cool and useful info. I wasn't clear on the compatibility, and the Ademco tech website are didn't show much in the way of compatible components for the Vector panel.

 

The points actually are programmed as right loop and left loop dip so each point has 2 zones 1 supervised and 1 non supervised. so on fire points you had to skip 1 zone on your list.

 

I had previously shut down power to the system and turned it back on thinking that the open circuit would clear. This did not work. When I opened the control panel to get to the fuses I unplugged power and "disconnected the battery". Checked all fuses which were ok. Looked for anything that looked damaged or burnt and found nothing. Very surprised that "the beast" was dust free and looked brand new but did minor clean up. After reconnecting battery and power the system became fully operational. Not having any expertise in this, my thought is that until the battery was disconnected, along with the power, the OC would not clear itself. I guess there is something to say for "old beasts".

 

True enough. Some of the older alarms have fairly simple and robust electronics, and will recover from things that would scramble the firmware on the more modern panels with their greater number of IC chips.

Sometimes, a full powerdown/powerup is all a system needs.