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DSC Alarm Systems
By fthomas | September 28, 2009
Over the past weekend, I had the pleasure or should I say the trepidation and fear of installing one of the DSC alarm systems called the DSC 864. The first off I’m going to tell you that when it comes the technology, I think I’m a pretty savvy guy. But the DSC 864 definitely challenge me. Let me give you bit of background before I begin my story.
I like to have total control over the technology within my home so that just doesn’t stop when it comes to install an alarm system. I’m not much of a person to not have access to technology running in my home. Alarm companies really don’t want you to play with the alarm system. This weekend I discovered why.
I had an alarm system in my home which I installed about six years ago. It’s a much older unit that seems to of seen its last days on this past Saturday. It started to chirp all day long. The Lisa say it took me maybe four hours of this chirping to decide it was time to tackle installing my acquired DSC alarm systems.
Company of previously worked for had removed the system for newer system and I purchased it from my company fairly inexpensively. It came with all kinds of gizmos including multiple keypads, expander modules and the heart of the system the DSC 864.
I did play with the unit several times over the past couple years since I bought it, but found it to be fairly complex so I’ve put away for another rainy day. Well on Saturday it was raining. I knew I had to install the new alarm system so I decided to start cracking and figure out the system once and for all.
Programming the system is really not easy. I believe one of the things that makes it hard to program is that the installer manual is not very well written. There is a lot of information that is missing that I found by surfing the Internet for many hours.
I believe the first thing you have to get by is understanding how the DSC 864 stores its configuration. You have to enter the installer mode to configure a majority of the settings within the unit. Fortunately entering the installer mode is quite easy. It’s a simple matter of typing in the following key sequence: *8 installer code.
Next, you need to set up the zones that you will be monitoring within the unit. A quick definition of a zone, is a device that you are monitoring such as a motion sensor or door contact. It’s ideal to have only one device per zone, but you can stream multiple devices on to one zone.
Out-of-the-box, the DSC 864 can handle up to 64 zones. But you must know, that the controller card only handles eight zones. If you wish to have more zones, you need to add expander cards double at eight zones per card.
A quick tip for you regarding expander cards. When you add in expander card you must put a jumper between the temper terminal and the black terminal on the COM bus. Search the Internet for more details.
Next you must methodically go through all the zones and program several features per zone. First you’ll program what the zone is. The zone could be an instant alarm, an interior stay/away or such. Next you must select the feature the zone has such as chime, bypass and other settings like this.
Finally you must assign the zones to a partition. Now a partition within a system is the area that you will be arming or disarming as a whole. In most homes, you’ll probably only use one partition.
The company that this alarm was removed from had three partitions for three different business sections. So as you can see this alarm system is quite flexible.
One final task that was a little tricky into I figured it out was actually assigning meaningful names to each zone. To enter the alphanumeric data entry part of the programming, you simply hit the *after entering into the installer mode.
You can then choose the subsection for the particular zone name and enter it there. Just another quick note for you, when you enter the name make sure you hit the star and not the pound key to complete the entry. I must’ve entered the names twice before I realized my mistake. That’s one thing about this alarm system, they sequence that you would normally hit everywhere else to complete an entry may change in the subsection.
Well that’s a real quick runover of setting up a DSC alarm systems, DSC 864. Uses search engines to find the following documents:
- installer guide
- installer worksheets
- shortcut sheets for DSC 864
- installer sheets for the expander modules
If you have any questions please feel free to leave your comments below. Also if you need any expander modules, feel free to contact me. Oh and if you have an escort module for this unit, I’d be interested in talking to you as well.
Tags: home security doors, lighting automation, home security door, automated house
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