Three hours to find a bad splice in a brand new panel

I spent THREE HOURS on a residential job off Maple Street yesterday because a brand new Vista panel kept showing a tamper fault on zone 7. Turns out the factory had a cold solder joint on the terminal strip inside the metal casing. Has anyone else had to tear apart a brand new panel to fix something that should have been caught at the factory?

2 comments

2 Comments

kellyr181mo ago

I mean yeah but three hours though? That's a lot of time to spend on something that's pretty basic troubleshooting. I get it's frustrating when a brand new panel has a bad solder joint but you gotta work smarter not harder. Check voltage on the terminal first, then look for obvious stuff like loose wires or broken traces before you start tearing into the casing. Most factory defects are just bad connections not a full blown component failure. You could have swapped the zone to a spare terminal and moved on for now, then dealt with Vista later when they send a replacement. Sometimes we overthink these things.

lindahunt1mo ago

Oh man, preach.