Eric in California asks How to set his duress code on a Honeywell L5100 control panel

Hi DIYers. This is Sterling with Alarm Grid and today we have a question from Eric in California. Eric wants to know how to set his duress code for his L5100 LYNX Touch Wireless Alarm Control Panel. For those of you that don't know, the duress code is a special emergency code, 4 digit user code, that when entered, it will send a silent panic alarm to the central station.

Basically, it's used for the instances of the home invasion where the criminal approaches you while you're entering your home. Worse case scenario, we hope none of you ever run into this kind of thing. But, a guy comes up, puts a gun in your back and says, "You better turn this system off. No funny stuff, or else."

What the duress code is, you enter the code, to the criminal it looks like you're just simply disarming. The panel goes silent because obviously an audible alarm would defeat the whole purpose. The panel goes silent, sends a message to the alarm that a duress code was used to enter, they know not to call the house because again that would alert the intruder to something going on. They don't do anything other than call the police.

Next thing you know, the police are there and hopefully it works out. Again, hopefully we never need to use this, but it's always good to protect yourself and protect your family, so I'm going to walk you through how to set your duress code.

What we want to do, from the Home screen, want to press More, bottom right. Want to click on Tools, we want to enter our master code. In a previous video we had set our master code to 5-6-2-0, and enter that, which gets us to our user screen. We're going to click the User icon in the top left.

And you notice here it says, Master, Babysitter and Duress. We're going to click on Duress. You click Edit, bottom left. Then show Duress is user code 16, the final user code. It's not really a user, because you only want to be doing this when you're disarming. You don't even want to use it to arm. It's only when you're disarming in one of these emergency situations.

So, you click User Code and you now have your screen here. I always recommend doing something that you'll remember. On the old key pad style alarms we used to recommend doing 1-7-9-3 or 2-5-8-0, something that would be, even in the high stress situation, we'll remember it, the four keys around or straight down the middle.

Since this one is a touch screen key pad, it's not so important to do that, but maybe for general reasons, it's probably still good to just keep it simple. So, 2-5-8-0, done. We now have Duress [learned] in. You've got to click Save. And now on our screen you see that asterisk is showing that Duress has been set up with a code. Before we didn't have one and so it didn't show.

If we back out, back to here, we can arm the system. And if we waited the 60 second exit delay and then did a disarm and we entered the duress, it shows that the system is fully disarmed as if it was a normal disarm. However, if this was hooked up to a central station, the police will be on their way.

So, once again, I hope you guys never have to use it. But it's always good to know how. So, hopefully that answered the question. If you guys have any more questions, submit them to FAQ@alarmgrid.com. We'll get them answered for you. We'll either link to it on the website or we'll make one of these nice videos for you.