Unpopular opinion: the guy at the supply house in Tulsa told me most callbacks are from old keypads, not new sensors

Betty Wells · 2026-09-25T22:50:05.105834+00:00

I was standing at the counter at a supply house in Tulsa picking up a box of 12 contact sensors when the guy next to me, an installer with maybe 25 years in, started talking about how he stopped swapping sensors on every service call. He said about 8 out of 10 of his callbacks traced back to a keypad that was 15 plus years old, not the magnets or the reed switches everyone wants to blame. I pushed back at first because I have always treated sensors as the weak link, but then I thought about the three houses I visited in Broken Arrow earlier that month. All three had flaky zones, and all three got new sensors from me before I even looked at the keypad wiring. Two of them called back within a week. So now I carry a spare keypad on the truck and I test the bus voltage before I touch a single sensor. It feels backwards after doing it the other way for so long, but the guy was right. Any of you guys seeing the same thing with these old panels, or am I just late to this?

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Unpopular opinion: the guy at the supply house in Tulsa told me most callbacks are from old keypads, not new sensors | Alarm System Installers - Thought Shares