We are soon to refurbish one bedroom on the first floor which
currently has a grotty built in wardrobe that has got to come out. I
started to remove the hanging rail and was intruiged to see a small
white cable stapled to the carcase just by the door. The cable comes
up through the floor and disappears up through the ceiling into the
loft. Checking out the loft is not as easy as it used to be as we had
a loft conversion done 5 years ago so it is all neatly boarded out
with T&G and any wires that were there before are well and truly
covered over.

I've been racking my brains as to what the cable could be for and it
soon became aparent that it could only be the cable running from the
alarm control box up to the sounder box on the front gable.

Horrors, as I recall that when the builder was doing the loft
conversion, he had to re-route the cable to the sounder and as soon as
he cut it the b***dy alarm went off - even though he had disconnected
the backup battery.

It transpires that most alarms have a big capacitor in the sounder
box. This activates the sounder if the alarm is tampered with eg
having the cables cut or the cover removed. I seem to recall that it
took about an hour before the capacitor drained down. I wasnt too
popular with the neighbours.

Question now, as you might expect, is how does one get round this as
the cable has to be cut and extended so that it can re re-routed?