Honeywell 6160: Replacing a Paradox Keypad with 6160 Alphanumeric Keypad

Hi DIYers, Sterling here from Alarm Grid, and today we're going to show you how to install a 6160 alphanumeric keypad. This is the most popular keypad to use with the Vista series panels. Unlike the 6150 fixed English keypad, this has a nice alphanumeric display which is important for two reasons. One is for the user when you have your zones programmed front door, back door, garage door - instead of just generic one, two, and three - this readout will show the name of the zone. With a fixed English keypad it will only give you 01, 02, 03. The homeowner would have to know what those zones translate to. So it's nice to give them that access right here and know exactly what trips when they come home and they see an alarm history, the memory there, or something like that. The other important reason that it's in alphanumeric is for programming. Anytime you're going to be doing system programming, while the 6150 - the fixed English version - will access certain menus, you need the 6160 to really access the *56 zone menu because it's a deeper level programming field. Without this 6160 to show you what field you're programming, you're really programming blind, and you have a very good chance of messing up the system programming. So we always recommend that every system have a 6160. We're going to put this right here which is the garage door, the main access door, for the house. This door is on delay so when the homeowner comes home through this door, they have 30 seconds. Flip open this panel door. Type in their code. Turn the system off. With this keypad there is this flip-down door. You have four function buttons here on the left. Our system is programmed for panic. So pressing and holding this top button will trigger a fire panic. The bottom one is police. Then, medical, and then we also gave them a one touch away option so they don't actually have to hit their code to leave. They can just press and hold this away key, and the panel will auto arm. If they wanted to flip down the door, they could enter their four digit code 1, 2, 3, 4, and then away for away or stay for stay mode. Stay mode will bypass the motions. Away mode will arm up everything. When they come home they enter their code and they press off. The system disarms. That is the 6160 alphanumeric Honeywell keypad. We're replacing an older Paradox keypad. You can see on this keypad there is no LCD display. It's just colored lights. The homeowner would really have to know exactly what those colored lights mean. It doesn't give them quite a bit of control as this. So for DIY installation, it's great to have an LCD keypad. This Paradox we're simply popping off. It's connected with a four wire connection, the same four wire connection that the 6160 uses. So it should be a straight swap. We've already powered down the panel. So we're just going to remove this back plate, measure holes for the drilling of the back plate of the 6160, mount everything up, wire in the connections, and we should be good to go. This Paradox back plate has two little screws that need to be removed. We've already etched with a razor around the keypad to avoid ruining the paint job here. Now with the back plate unhooked, we can disconnect these wires. You've got the small little screw terminals here. We're just loosening them enough to get the wires out. The wires are unhooked. We've got our black, red for power, and we've got our white and green for data in and out to the panel. Remove the back plate. We have our access hole. It turns out the 6160 is the exact same height as this Paradox keypad, a little bit wider, so we're going to be able to put it right over this footprint. On the 6160 there's a front plate where it has the circuit board and everything and then the back plate that mounts to the wall. There are two tabs. We're going to use our flathead screwdriver to press those tabs. We now have our back plate. We're going to put this up on the wall. Mark our holes for drilling. Drill in the holes. We've got screws and wall anchors to mount it. And, then we can make our connections and pop this back on. You can see there's the four same screw terminals right on here just like the Paradox keypad - two for power, two for data. So we have our 6160 back plate removed, ready to be mounted. We were planning to drill new holes here, but it turns out right behind the Paradox keypad there's a low voltage plaster ring, also called a caddy box, and there's actually a hole perfectly lined up so that when we feed our wire through we can use the center holes top and bottom. We're even going to use the same screws that the Paradox keypad was using. So this keypad's designed to fit over one of these boxes and saves us a little bit of work here. So we line it up over the existing hole, top and bottom. It sinks right in. And the last little piece here, just to keep it neat. Make sure we got it level. We do have a little give left and right here. I'm just going to get it nice and level and then tighten it down so it looks nice and neat with the cover on. Sink them tight. You don't want to sink them too tight because it warps the plastic a little, but just enough to - actually, this might be a little too tight - keep it so it's not going to move on the customer. So our back plate is mounted. We can connect our ECP terminals here, our data bus wires. Right on the 6160 you can see there are four terminals. We've got a down arrow and a Y for the yellow, or the white wire in our case. We've got plus for positive voltage, negative for negative, and then up arrow for green - that's data in and out, to and from the keypad to the panel. So what we're going to do is connect our data, green to green, with these screw terminals. You can see there are screws on the top, and then there are little access holes on the back. You stick the wire in, screw it down tight, and it holds the wire. We're going to insert our green wire. Screw it down tight. Give it a little tug. Make sure it's tight. We've got our white going to yellow. White and yellow are kind of interchangeable with wiring colors. Again, we're using these colors because we know at the panel this is how it was wired at the panel. Obviously, don't just go by what it says here. You want to verify at the panel that the keypad wires are connected the same way. Then, we have our plus and minus power. Red goes to the positive or plus, nice and tight. Finally, power negative goes to negative terminal. Connections are made. Back plate's on the wall. You can see the two little tabs that we pressed in from before will connect right into here. First using these tabs on the top to hinge. Hinge the top cover. Make sure not to pinch our wire. I'm just going to feed it back into the wall a little bit. Snaps shut. We have now finalized the installation of our 6160 alphanumeric keypad. We are ready to go to power our system back up. And the next thing we're going to show you is how to address a 6160 keypad.