Ability of the Honeywell Lynx Touch L5000 & L5100 to call out for self-monitoring

We have had quite a few people calling in to ask whether the new Lynx Touch panels, the L5000 & L5100, will call out for self-monitoring purposes. Honeywell has been telling people that these panels will not do this. But we have tested this out here in the office and we do know for a fact that both of these panels will call to phone numbers for self-monitoring.

The Lynx touch panels will do what is called a follow me phone number. This will allow your alarm panel to dial two phone numbers beside a central station phone number. This is very useful if you do not want central station monitoring service right off the bat. You can have the Lynx call you in case of emergency and it will announce what exactly is being violated. To achieve this you will need to hook a landline phone line into your panel. The Lynx panels have a built-in phone dialer and the terminals are located on the main circuit board. You will hook the phone line's red and green wires into the panel just as in the diagram here:

 The other two posts are for going back out to the other phones in the house. If you run a line out from the panel to feed the other lines in your house then the Lynx panel should really be first in line. Now, that you've gotten your phone line hooked into your Lynx panel; you will now need to program the panel to call out to the phone numbers so that you can receive notification. You need to go into programming to accomplish this.

First you will touch the "More" icon at the bottom-right of your home screen. Another screen will appear. You will see an icon labeled "Tools" and you will touch this icon. Now the system will ask for your installer code. Type this in with the numeric keypad that appears on this screen and hit the enter icon. The next thing that you will see on your screen is a bunch of icons to different sections of the panels programming.

The first thing that you want to do and programming is touch the program icon. Then you will choose system type. After choosing system type you will choose the remote phone icon and enable it. Now that we are done in this section you'll hit the back arrow to return to the previous screen. Next you will choose the reporter icon in the menu. After choosing reporter you will choose phone one and then another screen will appear with one icon that says phone type. Touch the phone type icon and it will change to a new screen. You will now see that some type has changed to follow me. You will then touch the phone number I can't and input the phone number that you want the Lynx panel to call when alarm condition occurs. After inputting the phone number in through the numeric keypad you will touch the done icon. You will now be back at the phone one menu screen.

The next step that you need to take is to enable the reports that you want the panel to send when there is a condition. You can enable all of the reports by choosing the report all icon or you can select each one separately. You are now done with this set up for making the Lynx panel call you to receive notification. You can also input another number under phone two. Just repeat the steps above for phone two. After these settings have been set up your panel will call out on alarm conditions or any condition that you have set up in the programming such as troubles or openings/closings. When the panel calls you it will voice announce what is being violated on your system and will ask you to press a certain key on your phone to stop the message.

Now, keep in mind that, if someone disarms the system the panel will not make the phone call. If you have two numbers programmed into your Lynx panel and it dials out to the first number and then someone disarms the system it will not call the second number. This is a very useful feature and we are glad that we can help you understand a little better the functioning of the follow me feature. I hope this has been informative for you. We do receive a lot of phone calls concerning this subject and we thought we would write about it for everyone's general knowledge.