Been a long time. But I need experts on this, not FB idiots. I looked at a fairly large system today, for the potential of a take over. It’s a lighting system and control system. Even the TVs were almost 20 years old. It was like an AV museum. The caretaker told me their current company does preventative maintenance twice a year. Each time is a multi day session. He also talked like it was all laptop time.

Has anyone ever heard of this? What would it entail?

Depends on the control system. Are you familiar with it? Do you have the required software on hand? If not, is it possible to install the software on your current computer?

At 20 years old, I expect failures. If you can find 20yr old units as replacements, you should expect failures of these units soon. If you replace the old units with new, more current units, you’ll need signal adapters and control system reprogramming. Window shade failures, if any, could present major issues.

I know all of that. I’m not asking for advice on how to proceed. I’m asking if anyone has ever heard of preventative maintenance on a control system. We do it all the time on security and generators. But I can’t figure out what it would involve on a control system

I think it entails billing the client for 2 days of farting around on Reddit.

Is this potential client simply shopping for a better deal?

Or, has the current company finally had enough, fussing with this old stuff?

5 days. Plus per diem.

Looking for closer/better deal. I was shocked how trouble free the system apparently is.

Twice a year "preventative maintenance" seems like they are just taking advantage of the home owner at this point. Possibly when the system was first installed it would have been offered to keep up with firmware releases and programming fixes but a 20 year old system, there is no firmware updates being released and doubtful any programming fixes are needed anymore. They should really be looking at updating to todays technology

I could see once a year going in to do a good clean on the rack and equipment, complete any necessary fw updates (none have likely been issued in years though) and do an overall test of the system and identify and fix any possible issues.

It was sop for us to visit projects once a year. Annual maintenance contracts. Typically for two weeks. Test everything. Like literally test every keypad button and every touch panel button. Fix any problems. Upgrades and additions. “Laptop time” is probably how client staff would describe it because they have no idea what we’re doing.

Two weeks seems like a lot. Were you spending a lot of time on each thing to be thorough instead of press a button once and say “yep it works”

Big estates with multiple buildings. Dedicated theaters with motorized lenses. Moving walls and other weird feature that always break. Lots of motorization and outdoor equipment. I could waste two days just troubleshooting a few bad landscape speakers because there were 10-30 pairs of speakers depending on the project.

The first couple of days would be spent just going through a checklist and making notes of things that don’t work or that maybe work differently than I expect. For example we would run into things like Lutron keypads no long controlling XM preset stations via Crestron and Autonomics. So that would go on a list for the programmer.

After parts got ordered and the programmer got notified I would start on any updates like swapping cable boxes to the new models or digging up outdoor speakers to get them ready for replacement.

I can’t think of a single time I wasn’t working all the want up until my flight left.

In a large estate one could spend considerable time updating all of the channels and services offered by cable boxes, Roku, etc.

We do yearly maintenence on many of our sites, and I do spend several hours of Laptop Time. Firmware updates, checking error logs, etc. Sometimes I spot things in the logs that are causing instability and I have newer methods to improve the programming to get rid of the issues.