Happy days the sun was still shining, today i was joined by Simon our full time ELR electrician, Jonathan and Len. Clive is out of action for a few weeks, John was at a local amateur radio show and Chris was busy with interior decorating.The first jobs as usual was to check out the fire alarm call points in BBS and The Trackside, BBS fire protection system passed the inspections OK but The Trackside system showed up a fault on zone two which would not clear.
The fire alarm ceiling detectors were first checked to see if any of them in zone two was faulty using a known good one from zone one.
No detectors were found to be faulty so we turned our attention to the control panel, all the wiring was checked going into the alarm panel satisfactory. We then turned our attention to the fire alarm call points starting at the furthest point, call point five, this is located just inside the ladies toilets, on removing the front cover which proved to be difficult due to the screws being rusted solid.
Eventually we managed to remove the cover to find out that the back-box was corroded badly due to water ingress when the outside gulley on the Trackside pub/cafe was leaking. A capacitor was found to have a broken wire which was giving a fault on the control panel, the capacitor indicating the end of the fire alarm call points in that particular zone.
Simon one of the steam volunteers told us that Maplins would be open in Bolton and he volunteered to go a see if he could obtain a replacement for the faulty capacitor.
The rest of us meanwhile located and fitted some spare fire alarm call point surface mounted back boxes and set to replacing zone five and zone four call point back boxes which were badly corroded.
Lunch was then taken to await the arrival back of Simon hopefully with a replacement capacitor.
We had just finished lunch when Simon returned with a new capacitor for the total expenditure of 0.52p, plus Simon's time and travel, it was much appreciated.
With the replacement part it was duly fitted, the control box re-assembled and the system tested OK, problem solved.
The faulting and getting a new part to repair the fire alarm call point system took up most of our day, if we had had to call out a professional fire alarm company it would have cost a few bob no doubt.
So that was it for another day, we will get back to some maintenance of the station lights with a bit of luck.
