This is the first of a series of short reviews of the various bits of Texecom kit which I have now have, as listed in a previous video. These are my entirely non-expert opinion but hopefully will be of interest if anyone is thinking of getting any of these in.
This is a Ricochet (ie wireless and battery powered) version of the LCDLP keypad. Texecom do a range of keypads, of which this is the highest spec (being the ‘Premier Elite’ range). The cheaper ones have a smaller display (‘Premier’) or no display at all (‘Veritas) and do look rather old fashioned now. I’m not sure whether all keypads are compatible with all panels either.
There are also two types of Premier Elite keypad, one a surface mount (the LCDLP-W is also one of these) and the other a flush mounted one (without the keypad cover for some reason) which needs a back box sinking into the plaster. These come in various different finishes – brass, brushed metal etc. I think these look very nice, and when we get our hall redone I’m going to have one of these installed instead.
The other thing to note is the ‘P’ in the model number means that it also accepts proximity tags. You can get some of the models with and without tag reading capability. I’ve got some tags to look at and I’ll cover them in another post.
So as above, what I’m looking at now is a Ricochet version of the surface mount keypad. To look at it is exactly the same from the front, although a bit thicker and heavier because it has batteries in it. Here is a short video showing you round:
Learning the keypad to the panel is really very straightforward. The main thing to watch out for is to set the keypad address using DIP switches on the rear. If you are only using one (or if this is the primary keypad) you can leave it set as it is (which is address 1). However as I already have a main keypad I set the switches to address 2.
Once is done, you put the panel into engineering mode and press the ‘Omit’ key, then when prompted to ‘Learn Ricochet’ press ‘Yes’ (or the tick). There are then a few prompts to work through but following that the keypad syncs up and then behaves exactly like a wired one.
So the positives are that it is dead easy to set up, no wires are required and it can be mounted pretty much anywhere. There are a few negatives though – the display is off most of the time, and comes to life when you press a key. This is undoubtedly for power saving, and I think you can disable this but if you do it will compromise the battery life significantly. The other thing is that the LCD display is just not as good as the one in the normal keypad, at least to my eyes. It works fine, but the viewing angles and brightness are simply not as good. I wouldn’t really have noticed this without putting the two side by side, when you do it is quite noticeable.
So overall, if you want an easy way to put an extra keypad in, this is it. I would still I think prefer a wired one for the main keypad but for a back door or garage it would be ideal, or even if you just didn’t want to run any wires at all. It’s entirely possible to build a whole system out of Ricochet which is quite a tempting idea if you don’t already have wires in place.
I’ve now installed this by my outer front door, which previously wasn’t connected to the alarm and there are no wires in place. I combined this with one of the contact sensors (see previous post) to effectively add an extra zone which now makes much more sense from a security point of view.
Here is a quick video with a summary of my thoughts and a demo:
Universal Discovery Methodology 
It is a shame they don’t seem to have the option to mains power the keypad so it remains on and can use proximity tags without needing to ‘switch it on’ first. Often you can site a keypad where there is mains power available to use a mains adapter, but not practical or not possible to run a wire from the control panel. I’m thinking about Zone B which could be our garage with its own keypad, which has mains power, but not practical to get a wire from the panel. The danger might be someone disconnects it from the mains, but it could fall back to batteries and operate as it does now.
Let me have a closer look at the one I’ve got – it does I think have an ‘engineers keypad’ header on it and it might be possible to power it with 12v from there. It would definitely make sense to be able to power it externally as you suggest. I think it might also be possible to configure the behaviour for the prox tags although if it was listening all the time this would clearly affect the battery life. I’ll have a look and report back.