Astec 63/49/D/DV The Post Mortum

KoolKid

At it seems these panels are now on their death beds, thought we might say our farewells. Unlike a funeral you don't have to pretend, ahh ! sure he was a lovely fella & all that. .

The Pros
For me they were a great panel , that was released at the right time.
The building was flying, these were quick to install , quick to programme & easy to use. They suited those times great with us installing 5 houses in a morning at one stage . Think we done a floor of apartements in a similar time also.
For wiring houses what more could you want? An 8 core to the attic & you could pretty much do anything after that.
They did also come up with whats widely regarded as the best inertia sensor on the market here.
What went wrong?
Astec didn't move with the times. Sure they only introduced dial up when we were getting into IP.
The split system only came with the fusion, long after we realised what a pain the CD95/150 could be.
They still had the same style of SABB & refused to update that.
In general constructive critical comments went on deaf ears.
And as for the wireless........................Unfortunatly that never came at all. In general R & D was a very slow process in Astec. I think it was over 8 or more years ago when Frank told me of his plans for a system with 30 PiRs on a 6 core cable & no need for expanders or power supplies.

fred funk }{

I'll ad more to this later but I agree with most of your post koolkid.
I used to love installing them as they were very quick and easy to install but what was their main selling point was ultimately their down fall.

They were sold as a revolutionary two wire system that could take PA's, contacts, shocks and entry/exits all on the one pair. The same for the sounder bus with internal, external, relay cards and smokies all on the one pair. Now it was great it worked but it was a nightmare if one component went faulty as it brought down the whole lot with it. The only way to find the fault was by process of elimination or if it wasn't a permanent fault it was even harder to find.

Astec themselves were always brilliant to deal with, never quibbled over returns, Paul would always look after you but I feel a bit let down by Astec because I have about 30 fusions installed over the past two years and I'm not looking forward to telling them customers that their new alarms, that I told them was a modern, next generation alarm system is now obsolete.

I dont blame the staff but for how long has frank and ken known they were selling up? And in the mean time flogging us their death-row equipment.

altor

They where just to slow to move with the times, that was there downfall. I use to love installing there systems. As fred has said fault finding was always a pain but if installed correctly they would give as much protection as any other system.