Konnected, finally arrived and operational

This house was pre-wired for a Honeywell security system, 5 zones. It was never used because I just could not see paying a $90/month monitoring fee. I’m cheap, what can I say?

In January I bought a ST hub because I often forgot to turn on (or off) the porch lights. Figured it was time to automate that task. Of course, that opened so many more possibilities to satisfy my laziness. Now I’m not even sure how many ST switches/devises are in this house. But the garage door opens when I drive down the street and the front door automagically unlocks. Bonus if it’s after dark the garage lights and some of the house lights turn on as well!

I missed the kickstarter release by a month. I had to impatiently wait until late May for my 12 zone package to arrive. During the wait, I tagged all the current zone wires. Unfortunately the installer DID NOT label anything. Motion sensors were easy to identify because of the required power. Other zones I disconnected a wire and read the panel for what was triggering. Eventually, I figured them all out. When the package arrived hooking everything up was fairly straightforward. The only glitch was the smoke detectors. I did not realize that I had two listed unsupported “System Sensor 2W-B” four wires. I guess I will replace them but not sure with what model. I would like to use one that has either no batteries or at least 10-year lithium batteries. Maybe someone can provide a recommendation?

Everything else worked perfectly. Slagged all the old hardware to include the wall panel monitor.

My next step will be to place a couple of Fire HD 8’s on walls next to the primary entrances to the house. I have already downloaded Action Tiles and have designed what I think will be logical tiles. Looking forward to that challenge!

So Nate Clark, way to go. This has been a HOME RUN. I have only managed to inadvertently set off the alarm in Alarm Stay mode once by including the pantry open/close switch once this morning. Fixed that right quickly.

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The Knonnected system is good, but I still prefer the AlarmDecoder AD2Pi for Honeywell systems, because you do not need to mess with any zones. It just connects to the panel with the main 4 connector wires and you get full control over the system including a virtual keypad.

Interesting approach. At first glance Konnected still appears the more easy approach and probably cheaper. At least, has been been for me. Connecting the wires was really not an issue.

I’m also not sure how AlarmDecoder AD2Pi interfaces with ST.

Wiring is very easy, you literally just connect to the main terminal, same terminals as the keypad connects to. With smartthings it will map any zones that you have setup from the alarm system and then I can fully integrate those with the SHM. I can also manually trigger the fire alarm, security, chime etc. Also recently you can now add virtual switches for specific alarm codes. In my case I have presence setup to automatically arm my system if I leave or come home.

I can also remotely bring up a virtual keypad and hit buttons to manually arm/dism or change any configurations outside of smartthings.

The big difference is you can keep and use all existing Honeywell equipment and also even still use a monitoring service if you wanted. Also I can still arm my system the old way with the keypad if I wanted to.

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Ok, that’s great.