Hi, DIY-ers.
This is Michael from Alarm Grid.
And today, I'm going to be showing you how to power cycle
your hard wired alarm system, your hard wired security
system, such as a Honeywell VISTA system, an Interlogix
NetworX panel, a DSC PowerSeries panel, a DSC PowerSeries Neo--
lots of wired alarm systems out there.
But power cycling, it's basically a power cycle reset,
is another term.
It's basically just powering down the system and then
powering it back on-- the full power cycle--
power off and then back on.
Now, there are a few reasons you might power
cycle your wired alarm system.
Just like if your phone or your computer was giving you trouble
and you powered it down and then powered it back on,
did a reboot to try to get it to work,
your alarm system might be the same way.
If you were having problems with your wired alarm system
and it's not working the way you want it to, it's glitching out,
then you might do a quick power cycle
to see if that fixes the problem.
Another reason you might do this,
if you're installing new hardware,
such as a communicator or a keypad,
you're wiring a new sensor to your wired system,
then you want to have this system powered down
as you make hardware changes.
So you would power down, wire in what you
need to add to the system, and once you're finished wiring,
then you power the system back on,
and you see that your equipment works as it's supposed to.
So with a wired system, unlike a wireless system,
there's not usually a menu option
to where you can do a reboot.
A lot of the wireless systems will have a menu option
somewhere that you can press to reboot the system.
The wired system, it's not usually the case.
You actually have to manually cut power and then
manually restore it, which I'm going to show you here.
And do not confuse this power cycle reset
with a factory reset or factory defaulting, which
would involve resetting the system
so all its settings are set to their factory default
configurations.
You would have to reprogram the system from scratch,
which is pretty inconvenient.
So you usually only do that under extreme circumstances--
if you're not using the system any more,
you're giving it away, or if there's something severely
wrong with your system and you needed a last resort
troubleshooting step, it might be something you do.
But the power cycle reset is a lot more forgiving.
It's just an easy way to fix an issue or, like I said,
if you have to install new hardware.
And one thing just to keep in mind, when you do this,
if your system's in an armed state and you power down and--
you never disarmed it.
You just power down and then power back on.
You won't be able to cheat the system
and get it to be in a disarmed state.
It will still be armed when you load the system back up.
I'm not going to show you that, but I just
wanted to mention that real quick just because--
if you move into a new home, for instance,
and you think, well, if I power it down and then power it
back on, then maybe I can clear the arming state
and get the system disarmed, it's not going to work.
So just something to keep in mind.
We have our VISTA system here.
We have a Tuxedo connected.
The reason the Tuxedo is connected-- well,
it's to control the system, really,
but really it's also-- in this case,
it's to see that the system is powered on right now.
So that's a very good benefit of this exercise.
We can see that our system is powered
on because the connected Tuxedo is powered on.
The screen is lit up and displayed.
But if we want to power down the system,
we need to do two things.
We need to cut AC power, and we need to cut battery power.
And it doesn't matter which order we do this.
So let's start by cutting AC power.
In this case, we have a Honeywell LT cable connected
to the power terminals here, and we
can undo the barrel connection.
And you see, the system does stay on because we still
have battery power.
But if you have a Honeywell LT cable,
that's an easy way to do that.
If you don't have the luxury of a Honeywell LT cable,
then you can consider unplugging the transformer
from the outlets.
It might look something like this,
especially if you have a VISTA system.
The beige coloring's very common for the VISTA system.
So unplug it from the outlet.
Or you can cut power at the circuit breaker.
That's another option.
What you don't want to do is you don't
want to undo the terminals while the system's powered on.
That's kind of a no-no.
So don't take out your screwdriver
and start taking out your power connections there.
Don't do that.
If you have Honeywell LT cable, do what we did,
or you can unplug the transformer,
or do it at the circuit breaker.
They're all great options.
But we still have one more step of powering down this system.
We have to disconnect battery power,
which I like to take the positive connection here--
the red wire--
and we can just pull it right off.
And that came off very easily, but we have it disconnected.
And you see, our system is no longer powered on.
We need to power it back on, complete the power cycle.
Now, with a wired alarm system, the general practice
is to restore AC power first and then battery power second.
That's different from a wireless system.
Wireless system, it's battery power first
and then AC power second.
Our system will boot right up after we do AC power.
So we're going to AC power first.
We're going to plug in the LT cable again.
If you did a transformer, then plug it back into the outlet.
If you did the circuit breaker, restore power
to the circuit breaker.
And remember, don't do that.
Don't take out the terminals there.
We also want to restore battery power, because right now,
if there was an electrical outage,
we wouldn't be monitoring.
Our system would power down.
So we want to restore our battery connection.
We're just going to take it and plug it back in.
So now, battery power is restored.
And as I probably should have pointed out a second ago,
you see our keypad is--
it was lighting up before I did the battery,
so we know we were getting AC power to the system.
The system was powering back on.
And that is the power cycle.
That is how you power cycle your wired system.
You have to do the full cycle.
You have to power it down and then power
it back on-- the full cycle.
So that is how you power cycle your wired alarm system.
It's the same general process, whether you're
using a VISTA, PowerSeries, Interlogix,
Concord, what have you.
They're pretty much all the same general process.
You cut AC power, you cut battery power,
and then you power back on with AC power first
and battery power second.
So that's how you power cycle your hard wired security
system.
If you have any questions about security systems or alarm
monitoring services, if you have any question about Alarm Grid,
send us an email to support@alarmgrid.com.
If you found this video helpful, make
sure to give it a thumbs up below to like the video.
And remember to subscribe to our channel for updates
on future videos.
We hope you enjoy the video.
Thank you.