Honeywell 5811: Installation on Double Hung Window

Hi, DIYers. Sterling with Alarm Grid here and today we're going to show you how to protect a double hung window with one wireless door or window sensor. So a double hung window is a very popular style window. What it means is you can slide the bottom portion up to let in some fresh air and also from the top you can slide down if you wanted to let air in from the top, or if you were cleaning a window for any reason. So, when they open in both ways, a lot of people assume that they need a sensor down here at the bottom. You can see that this old system that was wired had a contact down at the bottom and actually looking at the top, they didn't even protect the top. So all someone had to do, if this window was left unlocked, all someone had to do is put some pressure on the window, slide it down and they could climb right into this room and no one would ever know that someone was in the property.

So what we're going to do, because we're putting our new Honeywell Wireless Lyric system in this house and replacing the old wired system, we're going to show you how using one 5811 Wireless Door sensor, or window sensor, we can protect both sides from opening with just the one device. So if we put this down here, then we would only protect the bottom, we would need another one up top. If we look at the middle, if we put the sensor here and the magnet here it's not going to work. If we put the sensor here and the magnet here, now we have a way to protect the unit.

So you have to have enough of a clearance, enough of a lip up on this back window that the magnet won't get knocked when the window, when the bottom portion opens up. But because the 5811 has such a small little magnet, there really doesn't need to be much of a clearance, just enough that it's not going to get knocked down. And we've tested it, this one's going to work. If you had to, you could actually open this up and there's a little magnet on the inside, in fact I can show you. There's a little tab on the side, on both sides there's little tabs, and using a flathead screwdriver, if you stick in and pry it down on both sides, you can actually access the internal magnet. It fits in there, but it's a white magnet that comes out, and this piece is even smaller obviously than the plastic casing, so you could've fixed this using Epoxy or some sort of bonding agent. You could've fixed that onto a very small edge or lip, so that if your window didn't have enough clearance for the whole magnet and the case, you could still protect your window with just one sensor.

So we don't want to assume what your double hung window looks like, but knowing that you have the ability to pop the magnet out and knowing that the 5811 has the smallest magnet available, then the theory is we're going to put our magnet, in our case we're going to fix it right to the window, right in the middle there with a double-sided tape and then we're going to put our sensor right on the top edge of this. And then, therefore, when the top slides down, the magnet will pull down to here, we'll get an alarm. If the bottom portion goes up, then the contact moves away from the magnet, we still get an alarm. So it's a very simple theory. When they're together the zone is happy. When they're apart you get to trip or the fault or the alarm, and that's what we're going to do.

So, just like when we use any double-sided tape installation, we want to make sure that our surface where we're installing the magnet and the sensor is as clean and dry as possible. So we've got some multi-purpose spray, we're going to spray our paper towel here, and we're just going to clean off this top edge as good as we possibly can. We want the window clean where the magnet's going to go, and we want the top of the window edge here to be clean where the contact's going to go. And almost more important that it's clean is that it's then dry. So if you're using Windex or any liquid cleaner or alcohol wipe, whatever you may use to clean the surface, you just want to make sure that after you've cleaned it, that you've fully and thoroughly dried it as well. This way you're going to get the best bonding possible and you're not going to have to worry about your sensor or your magnet getting disconnected or falling off or coming undone.

We've already programmed our sensor to our system. I think we have our volume down, but we can't hear it. But it faulting and restoring properly, and basically on the 5811 here we have two little hash marks. We just want to align this in between here, centered, so that the magnet will be in between these two little hash marks. In fact, I'm going to ask my helper to grab my measuring tape so that we can keep this nice and neat and we're going to center this magnet in between this post here and this post here so that it blends in nice and it doesn't throw off the aesthetics of the room. So on the back side of the magnet, there's a little bit of double-sided tape already affixed to every 5811 and you just have to remove the little plastic there that holds it.

All right. So my helper has gotten my measuring tape, and dead on center, it looks like eight and a half inches, which means if we go four and a quarter, we're going to be four and a quarter at the midway point of the magnet. We've already removed the backing to the double-sided tape, and so if we're holding this up at four and a quarter to dead on center of the magnet, should make sure that we're centering this as best we can. We want to go low to the bottom of the window where it meets the frame. And then we want to stick it as hard as we can to the window. We can double check our work. We got three and a quarter or three and three-quarters and three and three-quarters.

All right. So now that our magnet is installed, we peel the back tape from the center. There's these holes here, we just got to pull this backing off as well. Then it's very important that when we affix this sensor to the top lip here, that the magnet's going to be in between those hash marks. We push it down tight to the top of the window, and we want to test. When we open it, we can see the magnet stayed in position so it's not getting knocked by this window and if we pull down from the top to the bottom, the magnet's still in place, separated from the content.

So, we've now demonstrated how you can use a single 5811 wireless door or window sensor to protect a double hung window from opening either top to bottom or bottom to top. So we hope that'll help you guys save some money when designing your system. If you have any questions on how to protect your particular windows, please do email us support@alarmgrid.com and make sure to subscribe to our channel as we'll be releasing a lot more videos about various type of windows and doors and installing sensors on those various windows and doors.