I’m looking for some assistance… I have an existing house alarm (HKC 1070), Diagram of board attached.
Ideally I’d like to monitor a number of zones to see if there are windows or doors open and if so then turn off the Nest Stat. It’s a regular occurance that windows and doors are left open and the heating kicks in as a result of a room becoming cold.
I’m not looking to Arm / Disarm the alarm using Zwave… just get the the status “Open” or “Closed” from different zones.
I’m assuming that this is possible with the use of a Fibaro Universal Binary Sensor (Or other binary sensor) but would just like to get it right in my own head before digging into it further.
I don’t want adding extra Z-Wave sensors to the doors and windows (Aesthetics & Costs are the primary reasons). I was wondering if I could tap the reed switches that return to the alarm panel, stick the binary sensor in place and have the output of the binary sensor close the circuit in the panel again.
I hope that makes sense… has anyone tried this, or come up with a better solution?
Long answer, generally 2 controllers or input devices (your alarm system and your propose Fibaro sensor)
cannot read the same dry-contacts
because each device wants to supply voltage to sample the contacts state to see if they are open or closed.
If you test carefully AND you wire a common reference(ground) AND you power the contacts from one controller/device AND you wire the return line to the unpowering input device, AND they can read similar proof voltage THEN it might work for both controllers/devices.
It’s a lot of error-prone trouble that can be avoided by mounting a separate wireless contact.
A better way may be to read that programmable-output into the Fibaro, if you can set it to output “Not-Ready” or whatever logic indicates that a zone is open.
Thanks for the post… I had actually looked at Konnected already. The fact that it’s a full replacement for the alarm is a turn off. There are very specific standards to be met to get discounts on insurance premiums in the UK & Ireland… I’d prefer to leave what is a fully functional alarm in place and add the extra functionality to allow me see the open / closed zones and assign routines / tasks to other zwave devices based on their status.
