Part 4 of my intercom system whine.

Tonight I decided to take a closer look at what’s on the other end of my intercom and I’m even more perplexed by the choice of system.

Outside my building’s front-door is a large stainless-steel vertical panel (in this picture I’ve managed to chop off the top): video camera, a row of lights and icons, a screen, some buttons with dots on them, a number pad, and some other strange black block with a pretty design (a swipe key reader perhaps? we have a separate one of those already).

I pressed in my apartment number and it buzzed my apartment. It works that easily. What are all the other buttons for?

I gave the system a bit of a poke. In the middle of the panel, the four buttons with dots seem to be associated with the options at the bottom of the digital screen (so why are they visually grouped with the number pad?). All four buttons allow you to access menus that list the apartments… by Unit number: Unit 101, Unit 102, Unit 103, etc, in reverse order if you try the Z-A option, or by search. This A-Z and search feature might be useful for an office block to locate businesses but it’s useless for an apartment block where residents don’t want to be listed by name (and thankfully we’re not… for now at least, and I’ll be complaining if that happens).

The little blacked out bit at the top of the digital screen is where the building name appears (which is already shown around the building’s entry). The manufacturer on the other hand, BPT Group, take up almost half of the screen with their logo (pointless).

When I was looking at the panel I’d thought that the time had been incorrectly set. Looking at the photo now I realise that the “0″ in “06:44″ had made me think it had been showing me an AM time even though I was checking it out in the evening. “06:44″ meant 6:44pm. Of course. Why does an intercom need a visible date and time anyway?

I could keep complaining, but I’ll finish with the funniest thing that puzzled me – why is there a button with a guillotine icon on it?

That was my immediate thought while I looked over the buttons and it took me a good few seconds staring at it to realise it is actually an open door. Poorly presented and again a useless button for our building considering a person wanting to gain entry has to have someone on the inside press a button (oh, sorry, two buttons) to let them in.

The requirements, as I see them, for my building’s entry panel for the intercom system are:

• the ability to buzz and talk with apartments
• a video camera to feed to the intercom receivers in the apartments

This system meets those requirements but it has a lot of awkward and pointless bells and whistles (and guillotines) thrown in.