New Panel upgrade options

Irish Steve

Have an old Vista 5 panel which is working fine, but looking at options for upgrade. The present panel uses all of the 5 zones, it has an external bell box with external strobe and repeater the other end of the house, 2 key pads, and 2 panic buttons.

There are 2 entry exit doors, 10 ground floor windows, 2 external doors that are not entry exit, 11 first floor velux windows, 2 up and over doors in the garage, and a door and window sensor in the garage as well, so a total of 29 sensor points, and 4 smoke/fire detectors that are powered from the panel. All the ground floor windows have at least one vibration detector, and a reed on each opening.

The ground floor is split into 2 zones, the upstairs windows are zone 3, and the garage zone 4, with 5 being the fire zone.

I put the original panel in a long time ago (No PSA nonsense in those days), and it's been very reliable, so I know the existing system very well, there are 2 tamper protected junction boxes close to the panel with a lot of wiring in them to allow joints outside of the main panel, so the panel itself is very structured. I would look at doing a similar structure with the replacement, so that the birds nest is kept away from the panel, to make maintenance there easy.

As you can see from the list above, there are quite a few windows on each zone, and identifying which one is the problem is not possible at the moment, all we get is a Zone number, which can relate to several windows.

There are also some smoke detectors that are tied into a fire zone, with some special tweaks in the garage to allow the smoke detector there to be temporarily switched off, the switching also prevents the alarm being set if the smoke alarm is disabled, if the smoke detector is off, the alarm zone is opened.

I know it will mean putting in a lot of changes to the zone wiring, as they are in series at the moment, if that is done, I will clearly need a panel with a lot more zones so that each location can be identified. Access to the wiring is not a major hassle, it's a dormer bungalow, and most of the wiring runs in the crawl spaces of the roof, which are accessible from the upper floor.

At present, there are no PIR sensors, we have cats that have free roam 24/7, and the human residents move around internally at night as well.

The sensors in place now have no ID capability, they are simple reeds and knock detectors, wired using standard 4 wire connect for alarm and tamper. I could change to ID sensors if it's appropriate, though that would present some problems in tiled areas such as bathrooms.

If I go the route of splitting them out to one room per zone, how do I then identify them on the panel, it it a case of using zone expanders external or internal to the panel, if external, how does the panel then work out which zone is the one giving the alarm/

I also want to put in a texting unit so that I can send alarms to mobiles if an activation occurs

I'd also like to put in a remote wireless receiver that could pick up signals from some external wireless sensors that would be fitted in an external shed that is not at present protected. It's the opposite end of the house from the panel, about 90 Ft, so I'm not convinced that wireless sensors will reach as far as the panel, there's a lot of 2.4 ghz WiFi around here.

There are also a couple of other special functions that I want to tie in to the alarm via some external arduino micro processors, they relate to some water level sensors to provide warning of blocked drains, as that has caused us some issues in the past, and being able to get that information via text message would be very useful indeed. it would also be helpful to be able to send a text if the mains fails, as there's a standby generator that will also be monitored for correct operation.

I don't have access to the technical specs of the current panels, hence the reason for asking here. I'm not even sure if I have a preferred panel supplier, my main experience has been with HKC's, I've put a number of them in (legally) over the years, and they've proved reliable, but I'm open to suggestions.

If the easy way to deal with this is a link to the install manual or manuals for the latest panels and their peripheral devices, that's fine by me, I can make sense of them if it's the best way to go.

Thanks