Hard act to follow

Who was the sage that said "Everyone brings a little happiness into our lives – some when they arrive, some because they hang around and make our lives richer and some when they leave?" Well, I think Duncan Sykes of West Yorks Police has certainly fulfiled parts one and two in my working life but I think he will fail miserably on part three when he retires (a few days from the writing of this article).

Duncan has had a long association with the alarms administration team in West Yorkshire, and, both on his own and as the leader of a team of technicians, has had a profound effect on the quality of installation in and around the West Yorkshire area.

Duncan started work on the Bradford City Police Alarms Team way back in November 1971. He was trained on a City & Guilds course run by the NSCIA under George Hodge (former Technical editor of Security Installer) at Loughborough College.

With the restructuring of the city and county boundaries of 1974 Duncan found himself working for the new West Yorkshire Metropolitan Police who let him loose to create havoc among the under achievers and substandard installation companies that were springing up at the time.

I have to admit that, in my installing days, I was at the wrong end of more that one Duncan Sykes alarm inspection, but the one all important thing I remember is that he could take my systems apart and find faults I hadn't even thought about and still come out of it leaving me with the impression of a fair, friendly and likable man. After those inspections, to put it the American way "I got my ass into gear, and I got my standards up".

Very few fall-outs
Later, as a newly fledged inspector I tried to remember the way that Duncan went about his job and do the same.

It stood me in good stead. I can now look back on my inspecting days and realise that every day I made a new friend, I had very few fall-outs with alarm companies even though some of them still had a long way to go.

Meanwhile, Duncan continued his campaign to get standards up. He was now the leader of a team of inspector/technicians all working towards the common good.

West Yorkshire was one of seven police forces working in the No 2 region and they were the first region to set up an Alarms Managers and Administrators Regional ACPO Group and Duncan was the chairman. Later they interfaced with the National ACPO Security Systems Group and Duncan sat on the group for ten years.

Standards on Duncan's patch were rising all the time but I didn't fully realise how much until I came to look at the work of installers in other counties.

His reputation spread far and wide and many an installer from another county has gone away with his illusions dented from one of Duncan's inspections. I have heard him called, "a hard bugger" and "a tough old sod" and many variants on a theme, but in all that time not one has every complained that he wasn't fair and wasn't reasonable about it.

I came to the opinion that it was the hard-won respect of a skilled tradesman who has just met his match. I have every sympathy with them – I've been there, done it and got the "I survived an inspection by Duncan Sykes" T-shirt.

The problem was that in the setting up of alarms management departments, some police forces elected to have administration teams only ... and whilst they had the power to throw any company that was troublesome off the recognised list, it did little if anything to help the installer get his standards up. It's a fact of life that cutting off the dead wood doesn't always cure the disease.

By now Duncan had seen and lived through many changes of ACPO policy, and many changes of top level management within the West York-shire Police force and, like the Vicar of Bray was still there beavering away when all others had moved on or fallen by the wayside. He did it by bending to the wind of change without compromising his convictions that getting standards up means getting false alarms down.

Any fool can criticise
I learned a lot from Duncan. I learned that letting installers get away with things was more often than not to their own detriment – not mine.

I learned how to tell an installer what was wrong with his system without sounding like I was condemning it, and I learned how to get the installer to look on the bright side and not be downhearted when I found his failings.

Any fool can rip another man's work to shreds; it takes knowledge, skill, tact and diplomacy to give that man an insight into where he has gone wrong and the vision to set himself on the right track for improvement – and that is what I gained from Duncan. He will be a hard act to follow and I do not envy the man who steps into his boots. I wish Duncan a long and happy retirement – he deserves it.

I learned how to tell installers what’s wrong with their system ... without sounding like I was condemning it

Systems like this one give a bad name to to all installers
Even though it is now 13 years since I sold my company to become an inspector I am still considered "fair game" if anyone among my friends and family has a problem with an alarm. At this point all my fellow inspectors on both sides of the fence will be nodding their heads in agreement.

So it was that the other week I got "co-opted" into looking at an alarm on a house that had just been moved into.

There was no sticker on either control or bell box and the previous occupant knew only the number to set and unset. There was evidence that there had once been a sticker on the bell box but it had been removed or had dropped off with the weather, either way it was an ill omen.

One of the external doors had a contact that didn't work, the wires were shorted somewhere under the plaster. There was only one PIR down-stairs, which was sited flat on the wall about half-way along the front (road) side. It only covered the rear section of the room and the back window, which was also covered by a vibration detector.

The two front windows and a fair sized area round them was left totally unprotected. There were vibro's on most of the rear windows upstairs and down but I discovered later that they were all on the one zone, without any form of latching or means of knowing which was the first to alarm.

There was no fused spur – Oh yes there was a mains flex running into the control, but where the wire went to was anybody's guess and, after a long search, we gave up, having totally failed to find the spur. It was probably wired direct into the mains under the upper floor. ( I hope the mains don't fail for too long because the battery is about the size of a fag packet.)

Tamper circuits were considered to be superfluous, they had not been connected, there was no paperwork other than a user manual and there wasn't even a list of what was on which zone, and that was one of the reasons I was called in ... The new owner (my nephew) had no idea what was on what zone, oh yes, and the bells weren't working either. This (when we finally borrowed a ladder) turned out to be a classic fault. They had not bothered to strip back the wires on the sounder and had cheerfully screwed the terminal down on the plastic sleeving – it probably hadn't worked from day one.

By now I was convinced that there had never been a bell test or any other test on the system from the day it was installed. This was confirmed when I looked at the wiring for the strobe light (Oh yes, there was no SAB unit, the bell box was made of Polypropylene and not Polycarbonate and it was fixed with two small screws, each into a big brown plug).

The strobe light was fixed inside the box where it could only be seen on a very dark night when the street lamps were out. But then it was only very loosely fixed. The reasoning here was soon obvious: the strobe was of the type that had one large fixing bolt on it to bolt it through the box lid and space to get a nut and a washer on the back.

  When they had tried to bolt it to the back plate the bolt was too long and was preventing the back plate from lying flat to the wall. The answer – easy, just loosen the bolt and let it hang loose inside the box! By the way, the reason it was not working was that the pos. and neg. wires were crossed over – it was wired back to front. Once again proof that no one had bothered to test the system since the day of installation.

Who are these people that can do such a bloody awful job and then take good money off the customer? Whoever they are they are ruining the trade for every one else. If it was an established company then they are not with either of the inspectorates and should be run out of town.

If it was a DIY job then this brings another point to the fore – who is selling them the kit? It was all standard gear used by the trade and not the cartoon stuff that is sold in the big DIY sheds. I think it's about time that some of the suppliers and manufacturers got their heads together to try and stop amateurs getting hold of the professional stuff.

These cowboys drag the reputations of both the good installers and the panel manufacturers into the mire. I have heard people say detrimental things about a certain brand of control when false alarms had got out of hand when it was purely bad installation that caused the problem.

'I'll never have another alarm system' I have also known people say they would never have another alarm as long as they lived because they had nothing but trouble with them, they are always going off, and you can't get the installers back out under any circumstance to fix it.

To solve this problem we can all help. The suppliers should only supply to bone fide installers who are on their books and not take cash over the counter from anyone coming in off the street. The manufacturers could make equipment without any form of brand labelling on them and then offer a screen-printing service. They do it with great success for bell boxes, so why not extend it to control panels and passives etc? (Incidentally, this may be a good time to introduce this feature because it could be tied in with the new EN 50131 and the labelling of equipment for the different grades – when we finally get the standard published.)

The installers – perhaps the biggest culprits – should learn to sell on quality and not on price.

Let me illuminate this point. One of my regular correspondents to this column is Jimmy Torrance, "the Alarm Engineer" of Manchester. Jimmy and I are friendly opponents and argue about many aspects of the trade where we disagree. Just recently all has been quiet on the Jimmy front (apart from his letter on page 19 – Ed), so I put this to him in a phone call.