An early opportunity to relearn the important principle of reading the manual.

I had installed one of the zones using a smoke detector, again a straight replacement for the old one. The manual said that it used a ‘normally closed’ relay which opened in an alarm or fault condition. So I wired it up (like the other sensors) to the alarm terminals.

For each zone there are two pairs of terminals – two marked ‘A’ for alarm sensing, and two marked ‘T’ for tamper returns. I had wired the detector up to the ‘A’ terminals, thinking ‘it’s a smoke alarm… why would it need a tamper circuit’. Also of course there are no tamper detectors in the smoke alarm anyway.

Cue a load of headscratching, as however I configured the detector in the software it always returned an alarm condition (it comes up as ‘active’). This is an issue because it stops the alarm setting and all I could do to start with was exclude it completely.

Eventually after a lot of searching I found a reference somewhere to using the ‘T’ terminal and this prompted me, finally, to read the manual. I found this:

D’oh!

One change of terminal later, and now everything works fine.

Life’s lessons learned once again

I’ve just upgraded the alarm system in my house. When we moved in several years ago there was an ancient ADT installed alarm system. This had been monitored by phone, but when we came we pulled out a lot of the wiring and more to the point didn’t want to pay any monitoring charges.

The system has been rather temperamental since then, and I’ve been keen to change it ever since. The reason for doing so is that I’ve wanted something more reliable and higher tech… and also I’m intrigued by the possibilties for tinkering that this offers.

I did quite a lot of research, and I ended up choosing a Texecom system. This seems to be a cut above the normal domestic brands and are clearly used in a lot of professional settings. I wanted to reuse as much of the existing wired infrastructure as possible, and so I needed at least 6 wired zones. I also wanted to option of using a wireless expansion for extra zones, plus as much options for connectivity as possible. I decided to replace all the sensors as well with modern equivalents.

I bought the following:

Texecom Premier Elite 48

Texecom Premier Elite LCDLP keypad

I was surprised how cheap they were – about £90 each. The keypad has a big display, and support proximity tags as well as some zone expansion. The keypads come in all shapes and sizes – you can get brass, metal, chrome and plastic versions, include a range which can be sunk into the wall. I ended up picking the plastic one because it was cheaper and I’m not quite ready to bash big holes in the wall.

Installation was pretty easy – just a question of stripping the old box out and rewiring the old zones to the new ones. Then the fun begins…