Three State Zone Wiring

[sanders2222]

I am in the midst of changing a 30 year old security system with an ELK M1. I'm 3 weeks into pulling wires, replacing dead contacts, etc. I'm at the stage of double checking before I switch things on. Then I just has an Epiphany and now get this.

 

Using a normally open, normally closed contact, plus the supplied 2200ohm resistor, you can theoretically monitor 32 doors, windows or other devices with 16 zones. This is called "3 stage zone wiring". Do you ELK owners do this?

 

Now I get why some of you folks are so interested in monitoring voltages in the ELK with the new ISY module. However, since my home had all normally closed contacts (except for glass breakage), I am limited to using one contact per zone. I have lost interest in poking any more holes in the wallboard and I soldered all those resistors inline for nothing. I assume 1 contact, 1 zone is what most people are doing. Even so, I still have some zones I'm not using.

 

Chalk this up to "Lessons Learned". I also learned why I need a ELK930 to monitor my doorbell and still use the existing system. I'm about to connect my battery and plug this thing in even though I'm still missing a few components. Wish me luck!

[gatchel]

Using an Zone in that fashion would be less than desirable IMHO. Most zones need a minimun of two states, alarm and secure...If you haven't done so yet, I would search EOLR and do some reading as to how they can be beneficial if you decide to use them.

 

M1XIN expanders are cheap and the "better" way to monitor more than 16 zones if needed.

 

I would never use a zone in that fashion in my system or any other system for that matter. There are some panels that do zone doubling using two resistors per zone but very few professionals that I know in our area choose to deal with the added issues / complexity when involving 2 different resistor values per zone.

 

 

Anyway, for a cut over, your pic looks pretty clean. Whatever you choose to do just make sure you test it regularly.