Alarm.com Operation With the Qolsys IQ 4 NS App-Based Alarm System

Hey, guys. Hayden here again from Alarm System store. And today we're going to be talking about the IQ4NS. That is this is newest IQ panel four. in the NS just stands for no screen. And basically as you can see, it is just an IQ panel. It just does not have a screen on it. So, the purpose behind this is for one to reduce cost by two. it creates a more modern experience because you are using an app to perform every function on this system, or that is the intended design of it. Anyway, so there is a new app called the IQ installer app that they have come out with, and that is basically how you program the system. It runs you through the IQ for installer wizard, gives you all the same features and programing options as the original IQ force. there are some limitations because it doesn't have like the the panel camera, the screen, the built in glass break, things like that. So some of those settings aren't there. But as far as, just general programing, that is all done through an app. We actually made a video about that, a couple of weeks ago. So you can go check that out. I'll link it down below, but basically I just run through, you know, how to program the system and all that. I just kind of give an overview of how the app works. And today we're going to be talking about the intended use of the system.

And the intended use is through alarm.com. So by default, this panel is designed to work specifically with alarm.com for all of the user functions of the system, such as arming, disarming. Of course with the alarm.com you get notifications, you can change zone labels, change user codes, things like that. All the features that are available to alarm.com's interactive plans, are basically how you would generally use this system. So basically today what I'm going to do is I'm just going to show some of the use case scenarios for, the alarm.com app with this system. Basically, I'm just going to show you how the alarm.com app works. how it arms and disarms the panel, how the panel responds to things like that. because it does. As you can see, it's got a little speaker down here. It will speak to you. so it has some announcements that it can say, like it'll give you trouble conditions. there's a button on the side here. if you press that button, it will actually tell you all of the current trouble conditions or any open sensors, if there are any. And just as an example, If I pull away the, the magnet on my front door sensor here, you heard the panel chime out and say, front door open. So yeah, generally I would say it's better to have this somewhere where you can hear it because the speaker is kind of low. So, you know, living room or wherever you tend to spend the most time in your home would be a good idea or would be the ideal place to keep this panel. So as far as additional keypads, you can use those with the system. And I'm going to be doing a video here shortly on how to use the IQ remote, as well as the, DSC neo, wireless LCD keypad. With this system. So we'll go through all the features that are available if you do it that way. but that is the only way to have a physical interface to the system for arming and disarming. so if you need some sort of physical interface, I would actually just recommend going with the IQ panel for, because after you purchase that secondary keypad, it's going to bring you up to the cost of the IQ panel for.

But, there are some customers that we've had in the past that wanted a more hidden panel, and this would be ideal for that. So you could stick this anywhere in the house and then just have a secondary keypad as your, you know, physical interface for the system. And that way anybody that comes into the house, like they'll see the keypad, but they're not going to have access to the actual system, which is this unit. So and that's another, pretty good use case scenario as well. but anyways, let's get into the alarm.com side of things. as far as this panel goes, activating it with alarm.com is very simple. when we perform the activation, basically we created the account for it and I picked up the panel, I hit the button on the side, and I was intending to go into the programing app. So that I could perform the cellular test. because that is how you kick start the communication with alarm.com. But the panel knew that it was activated. So as soon as I hit that side button, it performed the cell test and did everything for me. So it was kind of nice. So there's a few little features like that that I've noticed that are, really handy with this panel. The only drawback, obviously, is that, you know, there's no physical interface. So if you do ever need to go into programing, you will have to use that app, which probably adds about 3 to 4 minutes of prep time getting the app pulled up, getting signed into it and all that kind of stuff. So but as far as just daily use, alarm.com will always be available. So I'm going to get alarm.com pulled up on my phone and start screen recording. And I will be right back. All right. So here we are. got my alarm.com app pulled up. Oh one other thing I want to point out I am on an Android device. So, on Android the app looks quite different from the iPhone app where he used to. Anyway, I don't know what the iPhone app looks like because I don't have one, but if your app doesn't look exactly like mine, don't worry. All the same functionality is there. It is just the two different operating systems showing the app differently. So. And as you can see, I just have a regular dashboard here. I haven't really adjusted much on this, this is kind of our demo account.

The main two things that you're going to see on here, however, are the security system, which is this panel, and the Wi-Fi, which is the IQ, Wi-Fi six. yeah. That is one nice little feature about that IQ, Wi-Fi six. I, I did an additional video on that a while back, but, I never did get to show the alarm.com interface for it. And basically, this is what you get with it. So, you know, if you just want a full IQ set up, all of it does integrate well with alarm.com. but as far as the panel itself goes, the very, you know, the most common thing you're going to be doing is arming and disarming the system. So that is done by using this card right here in the middle that says security system. So if you click on this, it's going to bring up all of the arming and disarming options that you have for the panel. So by default you do get all of the normal arming methods which are silent arming, no entry delay arming and force bypass arming. And then they've also added recently, the ability to bypass specific sensors. So, you know, if there's a specific sensor that's got a low battery or dead battery, or, you know, the magnet fell off the wall or whatever the case is, you just haven't gotten to it. You can bypass specific sensors using the alarm.com app. And, so basically I'm not going to choose any of these additional features, but I am going to just arm the panel. I only have the one sensor attached, which I'll show you here. if you come down on the security system card right there, you'll see kind of a sideways oval with a zero next to it. And if you click that, it says no active sensors. And the reason this sensor isn't active is because it's not open. But if I open this, the system will let me know. And once the alarm.com has a chance to update which it can take a little bit. And that's I think mainly because I have pretty bad cell reception down here. so even though I have the Wi-Fi hooked up, the, the panel initially tries to send things out silently so it can take a few minutes for, cellular signals in this building to get to and from my phone. But there it is. It popped up. we got one sensor active, and it shows the front door, which is what I've named this, and it just shows it is open. And now, if I, pulled the cover off of this device, it would show tempered. And you can see those trouble conditions and alarm icon two. So not only can you come up to the panel and hit that side button to get tampers and troubles and whatnot, almost all of them will show up in alarm.com as well. So you can use that as a way to kind of troubleshoot, you know, first level, issues like the alarm center acting up or whatever the case may be. But as far as arming the panel goes, actually, I'm going to choose silent arming because I don't want to be open while I'm sitting here talking, but I'm just going to click arm away and one thing to note about alarm.com is that, as you saw, as soon as I click the arm away command, it immediately popped up and said system is armed away.

One thing that alarm.com doesn't show you, however, is the countdown delay. So the countdown now, there's always going to be a delay whenever you're arming a system. So I normally, you know, if you are working with DSC or any system with a screen, whenever you typed in your code, you would have a certain amount of time to exit the building or, let it countdown to arm or whatever the case is alarm.com doesn't actually show that. So even though technically alarm.com is showing armed away, it is still doing its initial countdown to the system being armed. I am going to perform this again, but I'm going to do it without using the silent arming method. And you guys are going to hear the panel letting me know as it comes down, how close it is to being armed arm. So if I click arm away, you can hear the keypad or the the system. It's beeping at me. And as long as this beeping is active, the system is still arming. So it will not be armed until that is done. But I'm going to fast forward through this until it's armed, and I'll be right back at nine eight. Now, when you get to the last 10s, as you can hear, the panel actually starts counting down to let it to let you know that it is armed now. So, that is the only reason I would really recommend having this, where you can hear it is so that for the arming and disarming functions, you can actually hear when the system arms when it opens, you know, whatever the case is. But, now that we are armed, I'm going to show you what happens when I open my front door. So I have this set as a delay zone. So even though I'm using an app to control and, you know, disarm the system, personally, I would disarm it before I even came up to the building. And that way, I didn't have to worry about the panel going into alarm or any false alarms like that. However, some people prefer to kind of just make sure that their system's doing what it's supposed to. So if you ever just walk in and open that door told me that the door was open and now it's counting down the entry delay, and the entry delay is the amount of time that you have until the panel just goes off. It actually just told me there's 20s left, so it does update you as it goes. But as soon as I disarmed, the command went through and it took so that is how I'm just normal daily function would work. And the same rules apply for this system as with any alarm system. if you have motions set up to only be active when it's an alarm mode, that is how it will function. The only thing you really have to keep track of is when you're arming and disarming with the app. Just make sure when the system arms that it shows the arm type that you want. so if you need it to be armed away because everybody is leaving for the day, make sure that when it finishes arming alarm.com still says armed away.

Vice versa for the stay mode. You know, if you're staying at home and you just want to arm phone, click stay arm and just make sure to check back up on it. You know, after, a minute or however long you set your delay for to make sure that the system shows armed stay mode. There's also a specific feature under the arming section that allows you to. do the smart arming. smart arming is, basically the time to arming, as you can see, you can set, for wake up, disarm my system at 8 a.m.. Good night. You can create one arm stay in my system between 11 p.m. and 7 a.m.. You can adjust all this. And basically alarm.com will just perform these actions for you. But, scenes are kind of similar to that. But, whenever you open one up, let's say click the home scene. Basically all that does is disarm the panel. So it's kind of just a, a shortcut, I guess, is what you would call it. But, it just allows you to create a single command that you can just kind of click and not have to go through the process of opening up the, you know, security system card and choosing whether, you know, you want to arm disarm whatever. And so there's some neat things that you can do with alarm.com. A lot of it is just playing with it to figure it out, though. I can sit here and show you stuff, but until you've actually gone in and actually experienced it, it's not going to, you're not going to get the feel for it, you know what I mean? So if you need to, you know, it, just any of those additional features, however you click on more over here on the bottom right. And that will bring up this page. Now this is all of the options for the alarm.com app. Now the two most common things you're probably going to be doing are going into the user section in the note or notification section. Users basically allows you to create additional user codes for your system. if you log in to this through a computer, however, the user section will allow you to create additional logins for your alarm.com, account. So if you have family members that you want to give app access to your system, you can do so. but the regular user section in the app is only capable of setting up user codes for the system. Specifically, this panel, there's not much point in setting user codes because you don't have without an additional keypad. You don't have a way to enter those codes. So if you were going to use this system fully app based like it was designed, I would just recommend creating logins for whoever needs it and then giving them permission to arm and disarm the system.

And that is the only way that you'll ever really need to get in and out of it, or arm or disarm, whatever. you know, as far as notifications go, this is where you're going to set up any sort of push text or email notification that, that you need for the panel. And basically you just come in here, there's a couple by default. The first one and the most common one that you'll always see is the alarm one. And basically that just means if the system goes into alarm, it's going to send you, a notification. Now there's a lot more notifications. I'm not going to go into all of them, like I said, but just know that this is the most important section of the app, most likely for almost everybody this is what people want to see. It's the notifications for all the events that you can get on the system. So just come to this notification section, play with it, create as many notifications as you want or need, and make sure that those work by testing the system. and that is going to be your very first line of defense, because anything that happens, it's going to tell you about it. And then you can respond accordingly. So if need be, as I mentioned before, you can come to the Manage Devices section here. And this is where you're going to name the sensors. so by default when you're programing this panel, it will give you the option to name them. And since you're already on a phone in an app, it'll give you a keyboard so you can type it in real quick and easy. So I'd recommend just doing it in the IQ installer app. But if for some reason you need to change the name and you don't want to go through pairing to the panel and all that, you can come to alarm.com. But I just clicked on front door right there these three little dots. And I get rename device so I can rename it whatever I want. You can also rename any other devices that you have attached. So right here it says Hayden's phone. And that is this phone right here. So if I wanted to give that a different name I could come up here, click rename device. and that just gives you basically the ability to customize your panel as you see fit as well as your alarm.com app itself.

So and there's not a whole lot more I can really go over about like daily use, for this system. But the biggest takeaway that you should get from this video is that the IQ for inches is designed to be a completely app driven system, and basically all that means is that it's programed and used with an app. Alarm.com is a paid service, so there are those that may not want to actually pay for any service, whether it be self monitoring or legitimate monitoring through Central Station. You know, whatever the case is, and everybody has their preference. But as for the app side of it, and this is what you get in. If you've never used alarm.com, it's a very intuitive app. I do recommend, if you are new to more modern panels, that you at least get an alarm.com a chance. It's $13.95 a month. we have monthly plans for the self monitoring on our site. If you don't like it, you don't have to keep it. We don't do contracts or anything like that, but alarm.com can be a game changer as far as your daily use with alarms systems. So if you're looking at getting an IQ panel or even the IQ for in US specifically, I would highly recommend checking out alarm.com because, for the average user, this is more than you're ever going to need. It's very intuitive, very easy to use. literally, you saw how quick it was to arm and disarm the system, come in, press a couple buttons, and it's done. So you can do that from anywhere in the world as long as your cell phone has, cellular signal or it's connected to the internet. So it's very handy. Very nice feature to have. Like that's going to do it for me today. there isn't anything more I can show you as far as alarm.com goes, without making this an alarm.com video and buy it. Give this new panel a look and I will catch you guys on the next one.