effortless

Damn! Beat me to it...

Sorry Gemini but everyone here is correct. Sling the panel and put a new one in. Alarm panels shouldn't be treat like regular consumer electronics where 'everything can be fixed with a multimeter and a soldering iron'. This panel is ancient and is well overdue a replacement, more so with the lack of maintenance. You'll save yourself the chew, headache and money in the long run by replacing it. No disrespect to you but the trade guys aren't here to tell DIYers not to do it and work you up, they're here to help you and advise you, so take their advice because there's nothing else you can do! Believe me, I also like to prove that a product is fully gone beyond repair before I chuck it, but then again, my side hobby from IT is electrics and electronics, and has been for the past 10 years and not to sound big headed, I know what I'm doing (98% of the time ) However, if multiple experienced engineers/tradesmen (regardless of their trade, alarms, electrics, plumbing etc) are saying to me that something is knackered then I'll take their advice. In this case, you should take their advice because the charging circuit on that panel sounds f%$ked and you have no hope in hell of repairing it other than getting a new panel.

Or here maybe? http://www.ciphe.org.uk

Due to wireless alarms becoming more common, a lot of installers have some experience with them. Looks for installers in your local area on http://ssaib.org/ or http://www.nsi.org.uk/ Installers who are SSAIB or NSI certified prove their competency and experience of security installations.

Middlesbrough eh? My neck of the woods haha. I would certainly go for monitoring. The people of Middlesbrough don't pay attention to bells. Well, in TS1 they don't. My parents were broken into one night around 15 years ago via the front door. Blatant break in bells went off (bearing in mind it rarely went off) and the entire street ignored it. Wasn't until our next door neighbour came home from the shop they alerted us and the police to someone breaking in after the bell timeout!

AFAIK the Honeywell camera PIRs only do reporting of images to ARCs for alarm verification, the consumer is unable to view the images for themselves.

Yup, exactly what Rich said. In theory, the variations in heat due to light exposure through the glass could open the possibility of F/As when using regular PIRs. Since I've installed this system I've had no false alarms and I'd like to keep it that way, hence going DTs in the conservatory Thanks

Hi all, I'm just wondering, what's your opinion on these things? I'm expanding the home system into our recently built conservatory. Obviously due to the amount of possible light etc I'm probably going to need a dual tech detector. I particularly like the look of the Risco iWise detectors (http://www.securitywarehouse.co.uk/catalog/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=616) but can't seem to find much about them on here. What's your opinion on them? I haven't heard fantastic stuff about Risco's other kit (wireless stuff mainly) but hey, this might be different. Thanks!

Nothing like 230v up the kisser amirite?

Seems like there's a market for 'em...

You are correct. This is going off vague memory for the 800l, I remounted a keypad ripped off the wall by sofa delivery guys a few months ago for a friend. The wiring was still okay and keypad has the two tamper terminals. I've recently been working on an Accenta mini panel which has both RKP tamper and the global tamper which probably threw me off. As for the Texecom, I always thought it was just the Prem keypads that were 4 wire! for putting me right haha

800l keypads use 6 wires for RKPs. Veritas 8 keypads also use 6 wires for RKPs except the keypad tamper is wired into the global tamper loop rather than having a dedicated tamper like the 800l. In essence, you won't need any extra wires for the keypad.

Nice to see that you called in a pro, always better if your unsure. Glad to see you got it all sorted in the end. Regards E

To answer your battery question, chances are your system hasn't had a replacement battery fitted in the panel within the past five years. If the panel has a battery which cannot supply it with enough power, it will sound internally and externally when mains is lost. If the battery is still in good condition (batteries should be replaced every 3 to 5 years) then it should be able to supply the panel with the required power it needs. On Menviers, if the battery is still good, a power cut will trigger the 'Mains power off' fault and the mains light will blink on the keypad and the system will do a short beep every 60 seconds or so. When you carry out removing the digicom, it will be a good idea to replace the battery too. Get a new battery which is the same rating and size as the old one (the battery rating will be in amp hours or A h) Just read the label on the old battery and get a new one with the same, or higher Amphour rating) No, the main reason for it is that if there is a power cut in the area, or an intruder manages to cut the power to your house (especially if the incoming electricity supply and meter is outside your house), then the alarm will still function whether it is set or unset, making your property less vulnerable during a power cut, so long as the system is set. A dead giveaway of this in your area is that if there is a power cut and alarms start blaring. It's because the backup batteries are old, dead and need replacing. Any panel that has a good, working battery fitted should never sound during a power cut.

If the digicom isn't fitted then it can't use a phone line full stop And to answer your tamper question, yes, logging into the engineer menu will usually disable tampers until you log out of engineers. As long as the panel is programmed to allow user resets (Option 10 in Eng Menu 1, Menvier default value for this is Yes) then if the panel sounds due to tamper, enter your regular user code or the engineer code to silence it and then when you have finished your work, ensuring the panel lid is on securely, reset the system. However, in this case, we are powering down the panel to remove the digicom so as long as the panel has no power tampers will not occur. Please also be aware that by removing power to the panel, your bell box (external sounder) May still sound from using its battery. You will need to take precautions against this such as warning neighbours, using the engineers hold off pins etc, found in your bell box engineering manual. Regards E

Chances are your panel is a TS690M (M for modem as it is fitted with the digicom module.) 9/10 this module just plugs into the mainboard via a header. Thus, one easy way to stop the fault is to isolate the mains to the panel (probably can't explain how to do this due to forum rules) and ensure the panel is dead by using a multimeter or voltage tester. Then unplug the digicom module (the engineers manual will show you where it is if you cannot locate it, unfortunately I or other users cannot share that with you unless you are in the trade section, which I am not.) from the main panel. Restore mains to the panel and it should clear the fault. Obviously, if you do not feel competent enough, or do not want to do it in fear of mucking it up (very small chance, but still) please consult a reputable alarm company in your area (preferably NSI or SSAIB certified) Regards, E

Take what I say with a pinch of salt considering I never actually worked on the system, just from observation and the occasional chat with the spark who installed the system. (Connections to alarm relays were done by the fire installers) When the system powered down during a fire condition, the keypads would deactivate along with the locks. The system was also a single door system in this particular area and the keyswitch areas were just mags, psu and switch.

Everyone above is correct. They will either drop the power to the mags and or keypads/readers to allow the use of exit routes which may be blocked by mag doors or to speed up people leaving a mag door area where lots of people are leaving. Back in my school days, all fire exits were protected by keyswitches and mags (to prevent kids bailing off) and mags were deactivated during alarm conditions by XP95 IO units. As far as I know, they don't actually switch the raw 230v supply going to the PSU, just activate a relay inside the PSU which powers down the mags as the units are only capable of switching up to 30V @ 1A.

I work for a small-ish game server host and we primarily use Windows for our boxes. Our public facing hosts mainly were getting hit by RDP brute force/dictionary attacks, even though we changed the RDP ports from the default 3389 to a random port. We solved this by firewalling off RDP connections to limited IPs (internal IPs and a jumpbox ip) using bog standard Windows Firewall on the individual boxes and surprisingly it was incredibly effective. For remote maintenance, we bought a small virtual server from these guys which acts as an SSH jumpbox (with Fail2Ban configured) which all external RDP connections are forced to go through otherwise they get bounced. (Moved to an RDP client which allows for using SSH Jumpboxes like MobaXTerm and all was well!) Get your credentials for the jumpbox wrong 3 times and it's then a pain in the **** call to me to get the IP ban lifted. Then we forced 64 character random passwords for all admin/rdp accounts, because we are great people. Fun, fun... fun?