A good day at the office.

Days like today give me a certain amount of satisfaction and also claw back a little of my partly lost self esteem.

I spend a lot of time chunnering about about aches and pains and symptoms and it all seems a bit gloomy for the reader so today, I have a heartening tale of hands on man work!!!

Today, I had a day as near to being an engineer as I get and it does me good to have to think about and solve problems. I went to 3 separate sites today and did the following -

1 - Went to a care home in Handforth to discover why a few doors with our Smartair locks seem to be open all the time. Without boring you, prior to programming they can be set in a held open mode and if this mode is not cancelled before the lock is initialised, then the lock remains held open until a valid card is used for the first time and then it reverts to secure mode. The problem here was that there were a few held open, initialised doors where no card had been used so it looked like the doors where insecure. A quick explanation later, and the problem was solved.

2 - Onto a college in east Manchester to replace a magnetic lock as it appeared faulty and was dragging power down in the system and leaving the door unlocked. I replaced the lock and the problem was the same. So I put the old lock back as there was obviously nothing wrong with it and worked back through the system to find the problem. The problem was the power supply and I don't know what has happened here but it has several powered outputs so that each output has its own fuse. We had 2 outputs in use on 2 doors. Once I made the "positive" leg of the power common from one output and the "negative" leg on its fused output, it worked fine!!! Don't ask me to explain that but the upshot is that it works!!!

3 - Finally onto a school in Northwich to finish off a job we started a few weeks back. I had to connect the electric lock, wire the locks relay correctly, install a new set of levers on the door, configure and commission the card reader and show them how to use their new CCTV system.

So as you can see, busy day and I feel good about it. I am tired now but that's just par for the course with me but the sense of achievement from today is quite pleasurable!!!