Honeywell Vista 20P wiring for two wire smoke detectors

How to wire two wire smokes to a Honeywell Vista 20P

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Hey, everybody. Jon Boroughs, Alarm System Store, and today I'm here to take you on a little deep dive of the Honeywell Vista 20P and how to hook up two-wire smokes. We put out videos like this all the time, so if they provide value for you, go ahead and subscribe to the channel, hit the like button, and leave questions for us in the comments below, try to help you out any way we can. I'm gonna take you over to the Vista 20P, I'm gonna show you where you hook the two-wire smokes into, how to program, the simple programming steps for that, and provide you a little information about those two terminals where two-wire smokes are supposed to go. So let's go over the table and get started.

All right. Here we are at the Vista 20P panel and we're gonna do a little two-wire smoke explanation here. What you'll need for this is your handy-dandy screwdriver, you'll need some wire strippers, and possibly some butt end connectors to splice wire or attach your resistors to whatever you're gonna be working with. Here at the panel, you see I've got zones two through eight shunted off so they're not giving us any problems. And Vista 20Ps or Vista 15Ps, whatever you're working with, 21iP, zone one is factory set to be used for two-wire smoke detectors. So terminals eight and nine are factory set to be used for two-wire smoke detectors. You can use zone one for other things but it is set up to power and provide reset for two-wire smokes.

The terminal eight is your positive terminal, terminal nine is your negative. So they are polarity specific if you're hooking the two-wire smokes. If you run a multimeter on terminals eight and nine you'll get a 13.5 voltage reading and those two terminals can handle up to 600 milliamps for power. We're figuring that is figured off of the auxiliary power for the panel which is 600 milliamps. So, you know, if you're running other power devices you're gonna have to figure that in. But zone one can usually handle up to 16 two-wire smokes from what the manufacturers told us.

So, basically, what you're gonna do is you're going to use 22 gauge wire. Only two-wire. So we're gonna use our black and red wires out of this four-wire strand to designate positive and negative. So what you're going to do is you're going to go in and you're going to hook your positive wire into terminal eight. And you're gonna screw that down. And then you're gonna take your negative wire and hook that into terminal nine, gotta loosen that up a little bit more. Stick it under there, screw that down, and this is gonna be your wire running out to your first smoke.

And I've got the smoke here, and I'm only working with one smoke. So this is how it's gonna look on zone one, terminals eight and nine. The wire running through the smoke. You notice I didn't put a resistor at the panel because it never goes at the panel. You do not put resistors at the panel. They are supposed to go at the end of the line. So since this is a normally open device, I've taken this resistor, right here, and I've strapped it between the positive and negative. So it's a normally open so that the resistor is going to run in parallel between the two-wires. And then I've got my wires, I've got my positive hooked in on this first positive terminal, I've got my negative hooked in on this negative terminal.

Now if you were doing more than one smoke, what you're gonna do is your wire from the panel goes to your first smoke. You put the positive right here, your negative right here, and then you're gonna run your positive for the next smoke off this middle terminal. So you're gonna run a wire from this middle terminal to the first positive terminal on your next smoke, and your negative just runs off of this terminal. So this negative, you'll run a wire from it to the negative of the next smoke and on and on, until you get as many smokes as you need. So that's...they're basically piggy-backing off each other. It's parallel wiring since it's a normally open. But you will only need one resistor no matter how many smokes are on this zone and that resistor will go at the last smoke and you will hook it up exactly like I have it here.

After you get done wiring your two-wire smokes into zone one, you're then going to go into programming and I've gotta keypad here so I'm gonna take you into programming. Let me get this situated. So what you're gonna do after you hook up your two-wire smoke, let me back out of here. Say you're outside of programming. You're gonna enter your four-digit installer code, which mine is four, one, one, two and 800. And I don't think I pressed it right so four, one, one, two, 800. So pops you into programming. First thing you're gonna see is installer code 20. You're then going to go to zone programming, star, 56, it will say set to confirm, that's only if you're working with wireless devices so just going to hit no.

Then it'll ask you to enter zone number and zero zero to quit, but we wanna go into zone one because that's where we've got our two-wire smokes. So you type in 01, hit star, shows you the zone programming summary, hit star to skip that, and then you'll end up on zero one zone type and factory default. This is set for fire type of and 09. But if you don't see that in there put in 09 for fire type, then you're gonna hit star.

Partition, we're on partition one so that's good. Report code. Reporting code is if you've got this central station monitored, then you're gonna have an 01 and a zero zero and then a ten and that will tell that zone to report communications to central station. Hit star again, response time one. I don't ever really mess with that, so leave it like that. Hit star. We get the zone information again. And it will ask you if you want to program in a label for that zone so when it shows up on the keypad it could say, you know, smoke detectors or whatnot. We're not going to do that right now, we've got other videos for that. Hit zero and it goes back to enter zone number and just hit zero zero to quit, star 99 to exit programming, and that's it.

Basically that's as simple as that for the wiring for a two-wire smoke. That simple for the programming and just remember only 16 smokes to zone one. You can have up to 16 and that's it. That's pretty much it for the two-wire smoke wiring explanation. Thanks, guy. Back over to me.

All right guys, that was it. So hopefully you learned a little something about the two-wire smokes on a Vista 20P. We got a request for this video. So we put it out there for you. So hopefully you learned a little something. If you like the videos that we do here subscribe to the channel, like this video, leave comments below, and we'll see you next time, guys. Thanks for being here. This is Jon. Take care.