Additionally, sometimes we forget that the customer’s paying thousands of dollars to have professionals come and fix these things. Don’t make it look like “eww, I could’ve done better than that”. If power and lighting systems aren’t built to code, then whole building’s will get caught on fire. The NFPA wrote the electrical code. The electrical code was written with fire prevention as the primary goal. Most every building trade has a chapter of the NFPA they study to get their licenses and certifications. The electrical codes pretty say that all wires shall be ran in a standard way. These codes are amended every time some awful thing happens. 300.11, wiring cannot be laid on ceiling grid. That was added because of a NYC high rise fire where 11 firefighters got tangled up in wires from every system you could imagine that was in that building. Still though, not many technicians consciously think of that and they’d rather run their wires on the ceiling tile, which turns into all technicians running them because “this place isn’t worth the time”.
Copper connections are copper connections in my mind. Security systems are normally closed, while fire alarms are normally open. Funny thing my grandpa taught me when I first started out was that I wanted to be a fire alarm technician, not because I knew how to work on fire alarms, but because I started out doing computer cabling for a temp agency. “Yeah! Fire Alarm Technicians do that! Fire alarm technicians work on everything!” Programming a smaller Notifier or Fire-Lite is pretty much the same as programming a DSC or Honeywell Vista system. It’s not that fire and security systems that are quite different, it’s the salary and the attitude. I’m stubborn enough to do better than crappy work just because I was making less and was treated worse at a residential security company. That’s how I became a lead tech at a commercial fire company, by doing the right thing even when my “mentors” told me “oh my god, flippin’ helper, no body cares! Stop wasting your time on crap that’s not getting inspected!”