Subject: From: Date:

Supervised line rats nest Dave Kolb Sun, 13 Jun 1999 18:48:17 -0400

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I have a fairly decent Admeco security system vintage 1991. It has window
and door contacts (most are there own zone), smoke detectors, PIR motion
detectors, rate of rise devices, horms, keypads and works OK but I do not
subscribe to a monitoring service or arm it during the day as I had it go
off once and bother the neighbors all day long.

I would like to convert it over to HomeVision and have it call me at various
phone numbers and send email when an alert happened. I am going to addon to
the house and will add at least an additional 4 smoke detectors, 4 new
security zones for windows and doors and some additional motion detectors.

As far as I understand, most of the security zones are "supervised" circuits
meaning they have end of line resistors so the Ademco box can determine if
the line is shorted or is opened by checking the reistance increases or
decreases. Is each circuit resistor "tuned" for the line length and type of
device or do most curcuits take the same resister value?

I do not have the wire to zone mapping (I bought the 8 year old house
recently) though I'm going to try to talk the security company that
installed it out of a copy.

The "wire closet" is a real rats nest.

I have a security box where most of the lines come in, most are R/G pairs
though several are R/G/W/B quads and 3 of the quads have resistors on one of
the wires (R/G or W). There is an adjacent box that has 3 small boxes that
act like jumper blocks where most of the wires pairs are connected thru
resistors. I think these boxes also assign the zones based on some jumper
settings. All of the wires are spliced in line and then shoved behind the
sheetrock and come out into each J box. A real crap job.

Can anyone offer some general guidelines for converting this sort of system
to HomeVision?

I will figure it out but would love some constructive suggestions to make it
a bit easier. "Don't try", "get a professional" are not allowed. I talked to
two security companies who each took 3 hours of my time, said they would
make a bid on a quite large proposal (not this but standard security,
automation, networking etc. on a 6500' home) and then I never heard from
them again. They were supposedly the best two in the area. So I decided to
become a DIY'er in this area as I already do most things myself anyway and
only hire people to get help where I can't do it all.  Even starting cold
can figure it out though not always before I'm about done ;-)

My plan is to remove all the security stuff and resistors and just identify
the home runs by trial and testing each end device. After identifying all
the circuits, rerun them down to my new wire closet and then wire them into
HomeVision mostly as NC circuits.

Some Questions
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Would a particlar jumper block like a 110 or 66 be useful for home running
then patching this gauge wire into the HV (mostly 24 I think)? I would like
to home run all the wires into the jumber block and then from there patch
them into the HV.

Am I really losing a lot by going to NO or NC circuits rather than the
"supervised" circuits with the resistors?

Any great way to trace the devices to the home runs? How do they normally
wire a room where each window is a zone - do they all typically share the
same common wire? I am presuming that some of the quad and pair wire runs
service a zone per wire and then share a common off another pair?

Thanks for any useful suggestions,

Dave Kolb

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