Siren Speaker Mounting Tip

If you are one to install equipment yourself or you work in an upfitting shop, you do need to keep some things in mind when going through the installation process.

In the case with some siren speakers, you need to pay attention to the markings and stickers that are on them. (They're not just there for decoration)

I only bring this up because we recently had to perform some re-work on a vehicle that was upfitted by another company. The vehicle had Code 3 C3900 Slim speakers mounted on it and the 'owner' was complaining that the siren no longer worked. After troubleshooting the problem, we quickly realized that the problem was with the speakers that were attached to the system and not the siren itself. Upon inspecting the speakers themselves, we also noticed that both speakers were mounted upside down.

These particular speakers state, in two places, the orientation in which they need to be mounted; one on the sticker located on top of the speaker and one located on the bottom front face of the speaker. In this case, orientation is important; since they were mounted upside-down, rainwater (and I'm also assuming water from car washes) was able to enter the speaker and was not able to drain. 

In a nutshell, not following the manufacturer's instructions was roughly a $260 mistake (and there is no telling how many other upfitted vehicles are suffering from the same mistake).