Clearing a Low Battery On a Vista P Series Panel

Hi, DIYers. Joe from AlarmGrid, and today we're going to talk about how do I clear a low battery condition in my Vista P-Series panel. Today, we have our 21P set up, and we actually have a bad battery attached to it, which is giving us this low battery condition. What this low battery condition is telling us is that the battery doesn't have sufficient charge in it to power the panel if it lost its AC power. And there's a few different reasons of why this could happen. One, the battery could just be getting old and that it can't hold the charge, in which case you'd want to replace the battery. Two, the battery could have been used recently. Like maybe the power went out. The panel ran on backup power, and it drained the battery down. And now we're just waiting for the battery to recharge. If this is a battery that you feel is still good, give the panel 24 to 48 hours to charge the battery up before replacing it, as there's a good chance that you'll be able to clear this error message and continue to use the battery. For this message to be clear, though, the battery is going to have to be sufficiently charged or in working condition. The way the panel figures out if the battery is good or not that is connected to it is that it has two different tests. The first test is, every three minutes, it's going to check to see if there is a battery connected to the system. The other test that the system runs is, every four hours, it will do a two-minute load test. What the panel is doing is it's simulating itself losing its main power and trying to run on backup power. Basically, it's testing the battery to see if the panel can run on the battery that's connected to it. And if the battery fails this test, you'll get this low battery condition to pop up on the keypad. If your battery is running near its end of life, you could see that the battery drops down too low. You get this low battery condition, the battery charged backup, and then the condition disappears. This may happen periodically more often as the battery gets worse and worse. So if you see these conditions coming and going, low battery then restoring or battery then restoring, it's a good recommendation to just swap out the battery as it's probably going to be unusable soon. The two ways that you can clear a low battery condition is, one, you can wait for the panel to run its load test within that four hour period to see that the battery is good or not. Two, you can actually initiate a walk test on the panel to force a load test on the battery to check it. If it is good, it'll clear that low battery trouble condition when you exit the walk test. So let's do that now. We just want to show what the walk test looks like on the system when we test it with a bad battery to get the low battery trouble to come up. And then we're going to install a good battery, do another walk test to show that this trouble will clear. So right now, we have a bad battery plugged in. After we initiate this walk test and get that low battery signal or that low battery trouble to come up, we're going to switch it to the good battery, reissue the walk test, and we should be able to clear that trouble. So let's jump into the walk test right now. So I'm going to enter the installer code and then 5 and then 0. Install the code that's default for 1125. You'll see it says 1 for dial, 0 for walk. We want the walk test. So now the walk test is in progress. So within the next five minutes, it should do a load test on the battery. And when it does that, it'll show a SYSTEM LO BAT on the screen. [RINGING] So there you go. We have our SYSTEM LO BAT, just as we expected. So let's leave the walk test and turn 41121. And now we're back to the main menu, and you can see we have that SYSTEM LO BAT. So now let's switch the battery to the good one and then re-initiate the walk test. So I'm going to remove the bad battery. I'm going to install the good battery. And now on the key pad we're going to re-initiate the walk test. 41125 and then 0. So now during the walk test, when the system does the load check on the battery, it will clear that SYSTEM LO BAT. So as seen on the screen, we're not getting that system low battery anymore. What's happened is the system has done the load check on the battery and deemed that it is good and charged. So when we leave the walk test, we shouldn't see the system low battery on the screen in the main menu anymore. So to walk out, 4112 and then 1. Disarmed, ready to arm. We have no trouble conditions when hitting star button, showing that battery is good and ready to be used by the system. If you do you have any questions about this process, feel free to give us a call at 888-818-7728, send us an email to support@alarmgrid.com, or head to our website www.alarmgrid.com. If you enjoyed the video, feel free to subscribe. And if you want to be notified when we post future videos, hit the notification button below, and we'll send you an update when we do so. Thanks for watching, and have a great day.