Phantom Electric Strike Opens Solution.
Phantom Electric Strike Opens – We’ve serviced an old apartment building in Melbourne’s CBD which was experiencing ‘phantom opens’ where the electric strike would oscillate open and closed constantly – we tested the strike on the bench but the hardware seemed fine. What could the issue have been?
A: Phantom strike opens are more common in industrial than residential applications, but in a big city they can certainly occur, especially with vintage hardware. The cause is going to be a metallic composite of conductive gunge that has built up over decades inside an apartment or office door station that starts to sporadically ‘close’ the door open switch contacts at a door station, triggering an entry strike.
Phantom Electric Strike Opens Solution
Resolving the issue can be tricky in a large apartment building because you need to access every door station so as to pop open covers and clean switch contacts – the easiest way to do this will be to pull an input wire from each door station one at a time – that means 2 guys on the phone and access to every apartment.
Once you find the door station that’s the issue, use something like acetone or rubbing alcohol to tidy contacts up. WD-40 can help too, and there are automotive contact cleaners available like Repco Contact Cleaner. Just don’t overdo it with lubricating sprays. Something to bear in mind is the design of station board and the amount of space you have to reach contact surfaces. Older systems with chunky pre-SMD boards are going to have much more space in this regard.
If this was our site, we’d start checking door stations on the ground floor closest to the nearest intersection. A lighted magnifying glass can help with this kind of job – it’s not always easy to see a build up of dirt with the naked eye. Rather than using a microfibre cloth to help with cleaning, we’d use a piece of silk ribbon – microfibre can leave strands.
You can find out more about intercoms here or read more SEN news here.
“Phantom Electric Strike Opens Solution.”
