Anyone know about alarms?

[paulrockliffe]

Wiring mine up, Texecom Premier 48. Vaguely know what I'm doing, but need a few pointers:

PIRs have 8 wires, tamp x 2, alarm x 2, 12v, 0v, FTAband RLED. Have wired alarm x 2 to the zone, 12v and 0v to the power points, tamp for tamp. No idea what to do with FTA or RLED? Leave them or use them?

Tamp I am connecting in a big ring and connecting to the tamper in and out on the board?

Door sensors have 9 connections, they're a combined magnetic contact and kick sensor. Labelled tamp x 2, alarm x 2, 12v, 0v, all ok. Then latch and reed x2. No idea what I do with these? I assume that I connect reed and latch together in series as two sensors, but don't know where these go on the board? One of these is a pair of sensors on 1 zone, how do I wire them together?

Help!

[paulrockliffe]

NH1 said:

Dig you get an engineering manual with the panel? I only ask as texacom seem to have stopped issuing them with new premier 24 panels.

What make are the PIRs? do the instructions not say what the connections do, you can obviously use most makes of PIR with that panel.

If I was you though I would wire the tamper with the supplied resistors with the panel. That way you will see which zone has a tamper fault, its all in the engineering book (if you have one).

Why have you gone for a 48, its still only got 8 zones but can expand further, do you live in a 48 room house.

I have the manual, it's on the internet so that's helping! Texecom PIRs, it sounds like I'm ok with them, don't need FTA or RLED, so just the tamper to wire up.

The 48 lets me run an expander in the workshop so the one panel will do both buildings as independent systems, that's why I went for the 48. I can't remember exactly what the difference was, maybe the 24 doesn't have zones.

How do I wire the tamper the way you describe? Haven't had chance to read that bit of the manual yet.

Next question, I'm running 10 x 2 wire smoke detectors. Realised I needed to know which of the wires is the in and which is the out, so just spent the last few hours tracing a voltage around the house! Anyway, the manual shows how to wire the two wire circuit from the panel, but the detector instructions are quite a lot difference. Ie I need to wire to V In, V Out and 0 V. The detector has A and B Alarm Relay, No Connection, 0 V, 12V and Latch. How do I marry the two up?

Cheers

[paulrockliffe]

dav123a said:

It's been a while since ive done this but I'll try and help. FTA is for when connecting more than one PIR to a zone. RLED I think is for turning the LED on or off. If your wiring it as double pole then connect them in ring to the global tamper.
As for the combined sensor and magnet I would think that alarm is one side reed is the door magnet. I would wire them as separate zones.

HTH

Thanks, that makes sense I think. I don't need FTA. Do you mean to wire RLED to the global tamper?

How do I wire as separate zones? Alarm 1 and 2 to one zone and Reed 1 and 2 to the other? How do I then wire the second sensor from that one?

[paulrockliffe]

dav123a said:

I wouldn't do anything with the RLED connection it doesn't sound as if you need it.
I'm not sure how you have wired it or what you are trying to achieve. I'm guessing you are trying to put more than one of these combined units on one zone ? For total ease of fault finding I would use resistors and have each of these combined units on a separate zone.


Again I wouldn't put 10 smokes on one zone or fault finding could get interesting.As it sounds like it's first fixed if you've got an 8 core between them then use the resistors and put 3 on one zone 3 on another and 4 on another.If you've got abit more info on the smokes it may be helpful.

ETA bloody quoting !

I've got 8 core everywhere, for the combined sensors I have a wire to the kitchen door, but want to put another sensor on the conservatory. The only way is to run a wire from the kitchen sensor.

The panel has a dedicated fire output separate from the 8 zones, instructions say two wires and up to 10 detectors. I guess the instructions on the detectors are if they're on a zone output instead?

I have 4 PIRs on a zone each, then front door dual sensor and rear door dual sensor. If I put those duals on separate zones, that's 8 used, so no space for a fire zone without buying another expander. I could use the 8 core to connect the front door to the keypad, which supports two zones though.

Smokes are Texecom 4Ws.

[paulrockliffe]

BTW, the PIRs have jumpers to set the resistors, so they should be right. I've changed the wiring to double pole now, which I think is what was meant by putting the tamper on the individual zones earlier.

[paulrockliffe]

dav123a said:

If you have 8 core to every device then use a pair for the dual sensor in the kitchen and another pair for the one in the conservatory and have each device on a separate zone.then you have 7 zones used.
If you are putting all ten smokes on one zone then you need one resistor in the first 9 then two in the last.
It's late hope this makes sense. I'm guessing this is for Durham refurb ? Nice job like the potential of the out buildings.

Hello, yes it's going in the Durham project; I need it setting up so that I can test the wires before I fix the floor down upstairs. At the moment it's holding up the floor; skirtings; coving; painting; carpets upstairs, so I need to get it cracked sooner rather than later!

On the door contact/kick sensors I'm looking at the instructions again now that I'm not on my phone; the wiring is shown as Tamper x 2, Alarm x 2, 12v and 0v. Those six wires make sense, it's Double Pole wiring as per the instruction manual. I ignore the Latch contact as I don't need it. That leaves two connections labelled Reed.

Am I right in thinking that these are the equivalent of the two Alarm contacts, but for the Reed switch instead of the Kick switch? If so, I connect these to a different Zone I think?

If that's all correct then I have a diagram that shows how to connect the doors together, so I'm OK with that.

However, that's not how you're saying to wire them up is it? Because how I've done it uses 4 zones, whereas you've got me using 3 zones, which leaves a spare for the fire circuit if I go down that route.

Your wiring has me running the two sensors on the dual sensor on the same zone, then the spare 2 cores passing through to the conservatory to pick up those two sensors on a separate zone? I think that makes sense now.

Are there any merits in doing it either way other than the number of zones used? I *think* my way would tell me whether the door was kicked or opened, but not which door. Your way would tell me which door, but not whether it had been opened or kicked. Or do I do *something* with resistors here?

I'll be honest, at this point I don't really understand the resistors fully, I'm going to cross that bridge when I've got the wiring sorted out.

Right, on to the Fire Circuit:

If I connect to a Zone, I connect 12v and 0v to the power. Then I connect A and B Alarm Relay to the alarm terminals on the Zone. I ignore the Latch input as I don't need that, which just leaves "No Connection (Use for loop through if required)"

My guess is that I use this to connect to the next fire detector, but I don't know how exactly?

Am I right in thinking that I connect all the 12v and 0v in parallel across the 10 detectors?

With that Alarm 1, Alarm 2 and No Connection, I'm thinking that I take Alarm 1 from the Zone to the first detector, then No Connection to the next detector, and repeat to the 10th detector, where I use Alarm 2 to bring it back to the panel? So the alarm circuit is one big loop through all the detectors?

Thanks for your help, really appreciate it!

[paulrockliffe]

Thanks, that's really helpful. It'll be Friday before I'm back to sort it out so I'll do a bit more reading this week.

Re Building Control, my electrcian was happy to sign off with me adding these smokes afterwards. Probably not right, but it's done now. I assumed they were compliant, because otherwise they don't make much sense regardless of effectiveness. Why bother making them if they don't comply?

In reality there's no way a fire can disable all of the sensors without setting the alarm off, all of the wires are reasonably well protected too so I just can't see it. Could bigger my loft conversion plans though as I was hoping to use the smokes to avoid fire doors.

Re the zones, there's 8 on the panel. To add more you have to buy an expander. Alternatively I can wire two zones off each keypad, but that's limited by having only 4 spare cores at each keypad.

[paulrockliffe]

UPDATE!

I fired it up last week, without the smokes attached, as I needed to test the wires and fix my floor down upstairs.

I got a number of errors, which are down to not fitting resistors. I enter the engineer code in the panel and get a list of the errors. I want to use Wintex to get the details, tweak the setup and work through them.

Wintex talks to the panel, but the panel doesn't let me in. The keypads then tell me that a user is required to authorise access.

I can't get past the error messages on the keypad to get to any sort of programming menu. SO I can't add a user that way.

What am I doing wrong?

[paulrockliffe]

Thanks, that sounds like the answer I was looking for! Awesome.

[paulrockliffe]

I manager to get in as an engineer. I then tried the laptop to see if it was allowed in or if I could allow it in from the control panel when it tries to login, but neither worked.

I've not touched it since as I've more pressing things to get sorted at the moment, but I'm happy that everything is going to work when I have the time to get it sorted out.

I need to know:

a) How do I let the laptop into the system via the USB cable?
b) How do I know what resistors I need to add and where?
c) How do I wire all the fire detectors together - Two wire from the panel?

If you can help with either that'll be great, I might have another go at it over the weekend.

Thanks again!

[paulrockliffe]

Thread resurrection!

Finally got round to messing about with this again. So far that's consisted of trying various things and thinking I've cracked it, only to then realise I'd worked that out the last time and I'm no further forward.

Had another look at the smoke alarms tonight, sat down with the panel instructions, the detector instructions and my wiring notes, removed the panel to see how what was connected where, then worked out how it should go. Easy.

Started to connect them up and used a multimeter to check for the right voltages in the right place. Second detector and how the hell is there voltage on those wires? They aren't connected to anything! FFS!

The voltage can only be resulting from an output on the first detector passing through the 12v from the panel, but it isn't supposed to do that on that connector.

I've had a look at the wiring diagram again for the panel and it has written in the tiniest faded and covered in arrows writing a different arrangement of letters on each pin. WTF.

So in summary, the answer was written right in front of me the entire time. I think. Once I rewire the lot, hopefully they'll work and I can start on the rest of my issues and get the programming done.

I still can't login to the panel via USB and Wintex. Wintex rejects my user name and UDL password, and all the options other than the login are greyed out in the software. All the instructions say everything shouldn't be greyed out, so I've no idea what is going on with that. Really don't want to have to programme through the keypad!

[paulrockliffe]

FINALLY got to the bottom of the smoke alarm issue. Tried a few things that made some sort of vague sense and wasted a couple of evenings, with no joy. Then I found out that there's a two-wire version of these smoke detectors, that are required to use the two-wire connection. Problem solved.

You can't actually buy the two-wire version anywhere, which is why I didn't know it existed or was required!

I've wired the 4-wire ones I have to a Zone instead and they appear to be working, just the last two to do and a resistor it fit somewhere and that should be sorted. Bought an expander so I can still connect my door sensors as I'd run out.

I've reset the system settings and can programme from the keypad, but still can't get Wintex in. So that's the next thing to sort out.