Customer ServiceUpgrading Alarm Systems: DSC PC1864 to HS2032
Hey, guys. Hayden here from Alarm System Store. And today I'm bringing you an alarm system upgrade video. And I get asked a lot how hard it is to upgrade a system especially hard-wired systems, just because they look intimidating. When you go to the panel and look at all the wiring. But it's really not bad at all. So I decided to document a system swap that we did and make a video out of it for you guys.
Basically, all I do is set up the new system, get it all programmed, and then install it. The whole process probably took me four and a half to five hours. For somebody new, it might take a little bit longer, but hopefully, this helps you guys out and shows you how easy it is to get one of these upgrades done. It's doable by everybody. That's why we came up with this business. Do it yourself. It is by far, in my opinion, the way to go. It makes you completely in control of whatever you want for your system. So anyway, hope you guys enjoyed the video. I'm going to start over at the table programming the new system.
Okay. So this is basically what, our system setup is going to look like. As you can tell, I got it all laid out on a table. Now, this is not a good method for testing the system that you want to do after everything is fully installed. But if you're just getting everything programmed and ready to go, this is a decent way to make sure your modules are enrolled. Make sure your zones are programmed. I'm sure you're everything's set up programing-wise that you want to do. And then all we're going to do is unhook all these wires and go install them in the proper location. So I'm going to do some programming on this, and then we will jump over to some of our installation.
All right. So this is what our panel looked like before. Actually voiceover recording this section, just because the microphone I was using at the time decided to die. And definitely not my fault for not charging it, but I digress. Anyway, my hand movements are not going to match what I'm saying, but I will explain as best I can. Basically, this is the 1864 that we were taking out. What I'm messing with right there is an Alula IP bat communicator that's coming out. The phone lines coming out, the zone expander in the top left of the cabinet up there is also coming out as well. And all the wiring right here that I am pointing to is going to stay. That is for the smoke detectors. Pretty much everything else that's coming out though, including swapping out the 4 amp batteries for a new 7 amp. So I will begin taking all that out in just a moment. At this point, I was mentioning the wiring for the smoke detectors there. So as you can see, the wiring is set up so that the green is in the zone terminals and the yellow is in the commons.
This is not a huge deal. They're not polarity-sensitive, but technically they are backward according to standard wiring. Typically you would have yellow in the zone terminal and green in the common. Green is more commonly known as ground. So that is what a common is. So it makes more sense to, set it up like that in case you ever need to mess with it in the future, or if anybody else comes in to do some work on your system. I don't remember what else I was talking about at the time, but basically, just kind of explaining what all is coming out of the system. And most of this is in a stage, wiring-wise. But, this is the bottom cabinet and this is the 5204 that was powering another communicator, which was an uplink cellular communicator. Those things take a lot of power. So a supply board was needed and an extra battery. So that was put in for that purpose. And the zoom expander there that you see on the right is actually the only one that, is going to be staying. I mean, obviously, we're swapping it out with a new expander, but as you'll see here in a little bit, I'm replacing and removing all the zones from the top left of the top cabinet down to where that zone expander is in the bottom cabinet.
The power supply is coming out. Like I said, we're swapping out both the batteries for one seven amp. That's going to be attached to the new mainboard. And that's pretty much it for the takedown. I believe I was mentioning about putting in a tamper on these cabinets as well as very easy-to-use, these tamper switches there. Just the principle of normally closed loop, cabinet tampers. So I'll be showing that whenever it is finished as well. In the meantime, I'm just going to show some footage about it taking out what was there. And the main issue we ran into was with wire labeling. So I don't know if you noticed, but almost none of the wires in that cabinet are labeled. So that is the majority of what I did while disassembling was pulling off for each of the zones one by one, and labeling the wires with the appropriate zone. Just so that we can keep everything straight. We know where everything goes. So if you're planning on taking out a system, your first step is always making sure all of your wiring is correctly labeled so that whenever you reinstall, you don't put anything in the wrong place.
One last thing I forgot to mention is we are actually replacing the communicators with alarm.com rather than a blue left or a blank. So I'm also going to attach a TLR 880, which is the neo communicator for alarm.com. And I will show that after it's done.
All right. So if it's a little wobbly and kind of moving the camera around a bit, but as you can see, we got pretty much everything just connected. All the wires are taken down, the batteries are are gone. We've got everything labeled. The only thing we don't have our these water sensors down here, they were never, labeled, and I'm not sure which one goes to which. So we are going to have to trace those wires, but we will come back with labels on them in a bit. But as you can see, everything else is pretty much done. We got all of our fire zones here labeled, we got a keypad label and the rest of our zones. So now what we're going to do is start taking these boards out. These little standoffs here can just take a little screwdriver, push it up on that tab right there. It should slide right off. I don't have a lot of room to do it with the camera in. So it's going to be a little hard for you guys to see, but I will do my best to show exactly where I press on these. You should be able to see it is just a little tab. Push that in and then just kind of pop the board off like that. We're just going to do that with all of these standoffs and get all this stuff out of here. And then from there, clean up the panel. We want to leave it better than we found it. So I'm going to get, some rags, wipe this all out, clean it up, and then we will start installing our DSC neo.
As you can see right there. Basically, I'm just installing the new boards, and I'm going to start wiring everything up. Pretty straightforward for the most part. And there I'm running the wire down to the zone expander for, the key bus. I actually changed this here in just a moment because we decided to split the key bus items up on DT-600s. So, you'll see me do that here in just a moment. But basically, that gives you more accessibility when it comes to adding additional key bus devices. Let's say we need an another zone expander or something in the future. It gives us open slots so you don't have to worry about the wiring in the main board. From there, I just proceeded to reconnect the firewire, for the smoke detectors and everything else that was disconnected.
Here, in a moment, I'm going to be talking about tracing wires with the volt meter. What I was referring to was checking continuity. At the time, I could not, for the life of me, remember what it was called. So you'll kind of see me stumble through what I'm trying to explain. Basically, you turn your voltmeter to the continuity setting. You twist the end of the wire together and whenever you touch the leads on the other end of the wire, it reads a tone from the voltmeter. And I'm sure most you know what I'm talking about. But here it's called checking continuity. And, I don't know why I couldn't remember it at the time, but anyway, I'll let you guys watch what I just typed real quick and explain what I was doing.
So we have four wires here that were meant, as flood zones. They're not labeled. We can't trace them. Exactly. It goes up to the ceiling. So, what I've done is at the other end of the wires, the one I'm testing right now is the battery. So I've twisted together the yellow and green for that wire. And I'm using this voltmeter. It's got a tone reading. Basically, if it sees a short, then it sounds a tone. nSo all I'm going to do at this point is set this down and then take each of these yellow and green wires and just touch the leads to these wires. And whichever one makes the tone is going to be our bathroom wire. That way we can label this and we know exactly which one it goes to. So I'll try this one first. And there's no tone on that one. Try this one. No tone on that one. Get those out of the way so you know which ones I've done. Try this one. No tone on that one, of course, would be the last one. I check.
And we get a tone. I don't know if you guys can hear that, but that means that this wire right here is the one that goes into the bathroom that I twisted together. So try and get a little closer to the, the thing. There. When I'm touching it, it's a high pitch tone. It lets me know that that is the wire. I'm looking for. So for now. All we're going to do is take our labels, cut one off for the bathroom flood. And we're going to mark this wire. That way we know exactly which one goes where. So from here, I just kind of, go around checking all the wires, twisting in together one by one and checking continuity through the voltmeter. Pretty standard stuff. So once I get all those labels, I'm just hooking up the rest of it got this zone expander to do, and they're going to stick the battery in it. And then I will be back in just a moment. And I'm going to show you the completed panel.
Okay, so here we have the finished panel. So as you can see, I'm trying to organize everything. It is best we could, and a little sticky isn't quite strong enough for that 18 gauge wire there. But we got our water board for the toilet. 80. That's all connected up. Wires running out to that comms. We did have to be connected to the grounds for a couple the smokes. So just want to both home, run for wire smokes with 18 gauge fittings, two on each zone. So the terminal ended up with four, 18 gauge wires in it, which was a little bit too much. So we connected those together. So we just have one lead going into the zone terminal. That makes it a lot more secure and if we go down to the bottom panel, it's a little darker. Let me grab a flashlight. So here we have our zone expander with all of our zones. We actually have a cabinet tamper lock here. So this, along with the one from the top, are actually wired together in series here. And they are running off the tamper for the zone expander. So if either one of these cabinets is open, then that expander is going to show. The tamper. So that's one way you can cover both cabinets. Using just one tamper. Essentially just wire these two switches in series, connect them together here and basically make one loop across the tamper in the black. Over here we have two, six hundreds. These are actually for the core bus connections. Since there was so much going up, going on up at the top, we decided that we would just have one core bus connection actually runs down behind the panel, into this corner right here.
We actually used one of these little cable connectors or these. And that is just so that the sharp edges of the cabinet don't cut that wire. And we actually had that issue while we were taking it out. There was a wire running down through there, and the battery got pushed against it and actually cut the wire. So just to avoid that, we put one of those little cable connectors in there. You don't even have to tie that down. Just keeps the, the wire from sitting on those sharp edges. And from there, we come down and we have our core bus connections. So we did this because of possible expansion in the future. Weren't sure if the owner was going to keep it as it is or potentially add on to it later.
This is a 2032, so we're only using half of the, available zones. So all we did, he's got four extra core bus connections there if he ever wants to add modules, more zone expanders, power supply, whatever it may be. On top of that, as you can see, there's a lot of stuff going on up in this panel because all of those smokes were home run to the panel. So, and trying to get all those core bus connections and everything up at the top on the actual main board was a little bit of a chore. So we we went with the went this route instead. These, these DT-600s are great for this stuff. So now that we have that all complete, let's plug it in and see what happens.
Okay, so we actually just got our alarm.com module. Okay. Message. Which means our TLR data is connected properly. We do have some troubles, though. It's not scrolling zones, which means all of our connections to our sensors are good. We got AC power. Everything's fine. So let us check those triple codes. We got service required, loss of clock. Oh. We'll fix that one in a moment. What else do we have? Okay, we have module tampers. Okay. So that is because we don't have the cabinet on the, We don't have the doors on the cabinets yet, so that's going to show up until we do. The TLR 880 actually has the cover off.
So that's where that's coming from. Let's see what else. That's it. So it looks like we are good to go. Okay, so here is our TL880. Got our. Oh, connect it up. Still need to, thanks. Both of the tampers. We got to move it a little bit because that tamper that's in there isn't being depressed. And covers off. So we use FireWire for the connection there. And technically if you have any sort of fire equipment on your system, your communicator needs FireWire. Also. So we're good on that. We have the Ethernet connected there. And as you saw, we have the alarm.com module. Okay. So this should be good to go once I fix these tape.