Old Eircom Phonewatch box (Mid 00s)

Fitzo123

Hi folks, need some help here.

Currently moved into my grandmother's old house which has an old Eircom phonebox, circa 2005, installed.

The box is connected to the mains and the phone line in the house.

Unfortunately, the box, as far as I can figure out tries to connect to the phone line for a test every 12 hours or so (4am on the box time).

In addition to this, it also causes our internet speed to drop and when testing, drops it entirely.

Any ideas?

Drifter50

Fitzo123 wrote: »

Hi folks, need some help here.

Currently moved into my grandmother's old house which has an old Eircom phonebox, circa 2005, installed.

The box is connected to the mains and the phone line in the house.

Unfortunately, the box, as far as I can figure out tries to connect to the phone line for a test every 12 hours or so (4am on the box time).

In addition to this, it also causes our internet speed to drop and when testing, drops it entirely.

Any ideas?

The system is trying to do a self test to the Phonewatch monitoring centre every 12 hours but I guess the phone line is now IP or you have cancelled the monitoring service.

You need to cut /disconnect the link from the alarm system control panel to the phone line. If the house and the system are that old, the phone line is probably coming into the house in the front door / hallway area. Once you find the phone line it should be obvious to trace a cable from the phone line back to the alarm panel

Without an engineer code you are not going to be able to delete the communicator out of the system so without getting a call out from an engineer so your only option is to cut the cable linking the system to the phone line. You should see the internet come up then but you may not be able to use the alarm system assuming you had the code anyway

Fitzo123

Opened the box, disconnected all the phone wires but now lack internet or a tone on the phone! I'm not well versed in these matters.

danm14

Fitzo123 wrote: »

Opened the box, disconnected all the phone wires but now lack internet or a tone on the phone! I'm not well versed in these matters.

Could the box have been placed on the line like a tap, i.e. the box was placed on the line somewhere between the telegraph pole and the main phone socket? Probably not the correct installation procedure but it could have been done to save time and pre-DSL it wouldn't have caused an issue.

If there were two sets of similar coloured wires inside the box, perhaps you could try to match by colour and join them? You can buy special gel-filled wire crimps which are used to join telephone cables properly, but I'd test it first.

boombang

Can you post a picture?

Fitzo123

I think the box was placed between the line and the main socket. Will post a picture in a bit. Managed to reconfigure the phone line so internet is working once again but I assume this also means it will attempt a connection test.

Fitzo123

Hopefully attached!

Drifter50

The way we used to wire phone lines in houses for monitored systems was to wire them for whats called line seizure. So this means that the phone line comes into the house, goes to the alarm panel, back out of the alarm panel and into the handset. This avoids the situation where the phone could be knocked off the hook and then the alarm can`t get a dialling tone so can`t diall out to the monitoring centre.

Sounds like that is the way your house is wired so if you can`t do this yourself you need to get a technician to link out the connection to the alarm panel so that when the phone line comes in to the house it goes directly to the handset or router.

Sorry for your trouble but thats the only way to ensure service continuation

Fitzo123

So, managed to get a neighbour to disconnect the alarm from the phone system so the internet is remaining on.

However, the alarm is still running its tests and bleeping every 4-10 hours when it discovers there is no phone connection.

The instruction manual online to lower the pitch of the tone doesn't seem to work (*+0 at same time) so does anyone else have a solution on how to knock off these status beeps?

Fitzo123

I have figured out to remove the fuse and I now sleep at night.