Honeywell Lyric Controller: DIY Installation

Hi, DIYers. Sterling with Alarm Grid here. And today, we're going to show you how to install the brand new all-in-one wireless Honeywell Lyric system. Very similar to the Honeywell LYNX Touch panels that you might have seen us install before in prior videos.

This Honeywell Lyric is a self-contained system. The control panel or the brains of the system is built right into this touchscreen keypad. So there's no separate control panel box wired to a keypad like a traditional alarm system. Everything is in this unit.

There's a battery backup so that it will work when you lose power to the system, whether that's a power outage in the house or a problem with the outlet that's supplying power to the system. And the panel gets power from a wall transformer, a two prong plug in power supply that plugs into a standard wall outlet. So just like all or most alarm systems, they're low voltage systems. They can't handle 120 volts from the wall.

So you're not wiring this directly into the wire-- or the power wires in your wall. You're wiring it to this unit that then gets plugged into an outlet. And this is probably the most labor intensive part of the installation of a LYNX Touch or a Honeywell Lyric panel. Once this panels is mounted on the wall and has power from this outlet, then it's just a matter of programming your wireless sensors into the system and then mounting the wireless sensors throughout the house. And that's very easy as they're wireless, there's no wires to run.

But getting power to the unit and getting the wires connected to this power supply can be tricky for a do it yourselfer. It might be something you want to hire a handyman or an electrician to do for you if you're not comfortable with this type of installation. But for those that wanted to tackle it themselves and have the proper tools, we wanted to show you how easy it can be when you know what you're doing.

So aside from the panel, we have some tools with us today, of course, to get this done. We have a small screwdriver. This happens to be double-ended based on size. And on each side, it could be flipped from a flat head to a Phillips. So you don't need this exact tool, but a small Phillips head and flat head screwdriver is going to be good. Because most alarm equipment has very small screw terminals when you're making your connections, and these smaller little screwdrivers come in real handy.

We have a pencil for marketing our spot on our wall, which you can see we really did. We'll go back over how we determine this location and show you how it's done, but we have a pencil for that.

We have a stud finder, which we used to verify that there were no studs in between our panel location and the outlet that we're going to use because it can be very difficult to get a wire through a stud if you're trying to do that horizontally through the wall. So in our case, when we chose our locator and installation, we made sure with our stud finder that we didn't have any studs in between where the outlet is and where the insulation spot is. So we know we're clear. We're not going to have an issue when we run our wire.

We have a power drill for our mounting holes and our screws for the panel. And we have a set of drill bits. We have a set of drill bits and a set of some screwdriver bits as well so that we can screw that stuff in when we get to that point. We have a level to make sure that when we mount our panel, it's nice and flat and level on the wall.

And we have a drywall saw, which we'll show you a little closer by the outlet. But to make the holes, we're going to use it up here and we use it down there so we can fish our wire up through the back of the Lyric so that when it's on the wall, all you're going to see is a Lyric panel here and the power supply plugged into the outlet. The wire will be underneath the power supply. You won't even see it. No wires should be visible when we're done.

We have wire strippers. These are going to be handy for when you're making your wiring connections. One thing that Honeywell did with the Lyric is they removed the barrel plug input.

So on the LYNX Touch panels, you always had the option to use the LT cable. And that was a premade cable from Honeywell that we offer on our site. And it has a barrel plug input on one and that you can just plug right in the back of the LYNX Touch. And it had two spade connectors on the other end that you can land the spade connectors up onto the screw terminals on this transformer and it made for a nice, easy installation. You didn't have to worry about stripping wire and connecting the wires the screw terminals.

For the Lyric, they removed that option. We're hoping and we've urged them to consider putting that kind of barrel plug in put back into a later version of the Lyric. So that might come down the line. But at this point, you are going to need to strip your wire and make your connections manually without using that kind of LT cable.

In our case, we're going to use some 18 gauge two conductor wire. You can see this wire is labeled 18-2 or 18/2, which is 18 gauge. That's the thickness of the wire. And two, that means it's two conductor.

And its stranded. This is stranded wire. And this is rated in-wall, so we're fine to use it. It is low voltage wire, so we're OK to put this in the wall.

And when we talk about wire, typically we have a few different designations. You have stranded versus solid. Solid means that the wire has a solid core. And if that wire gets cut, you've lost your connection. With stranded wire, it's a mixture of very many thin wires wrapped together and stranded together to make the connection. So if one gets-- one wire of the strand gets snagged, the rest of the stranded wire is there to keep the connection.

So a little more flexible using stranded. The solid core, typically it's a little harder to bend. Either one will work. In this case, we're using stranded. And we've stripped off the end of this a little bit so that we can show you how this works.

So when you look at all wire, you normally have an insulated jacket, which has some ratings on it, tells you what kind of wire it is and such like that. When you cut that jacket back, you can see what's inside. If this was 18/4, you would see four little conductor wires. Because this is 18/2, we just see the two, red and black. And that's what we're going to use to make our connection from the transformer to the panel. And you use your wire strippers to strip back a little bit even more on this insulated-- on the two conductors on the inside. And that's how you make your connection.

So just wanted to review the wire we're using, how to determine which wire you want to use. It's all based on the length of the outlet going to the panel. And because it's DC voltage coming from that transformer to the panel, it's important that we don't have a loss of voltage because we're using the wrong kind of wire, too skinny, or too far of a run. So we urge you to reference your Lyric installation guide when determining which wire to get based on how far your outlet that's going to supply power to the panel will be from the panel location.

And then finally, the last tool that we're going to use is our 25 foot steel fish tape. And basically this is just a-- we got this at Home Depot. It's 25 foot of this stiff, metal wire that you can wrap our 18 gauge to and tape it to the end of this. And then we push this up through our hole by the outlet. And hopefully we're able to grab it by this hole here.

And then that's how you run your wire through the wall from a location remote into the back of the Lyric. So we're going to show you that. And you've got to make sure you have your fish tape for that if you're going to be doing this.

So now that we've reviewed the tools that we're going to be using, we're going to talk about our chosen installation spot. So when you're designing your Lyric system and thinking about where it's going to go in the house, ideally you want it as centrally located as possible. While the range of the sensors back to the Lyric is more than what we're used to do with the LYNX Touch panels and the Honeywell wireless systems that have historically been around, those sensors would work up to 200 feet from the panel. With the Lyric, we're expecting more like 300 to 400 feet.

Slightly different-- well, very different, actually, wireless technology that the Lyric uses for its new 6 Series sensors. Gives us longer range and when you're considering the installation location, we want to make sure we're not going to exceed that range when we think about how far each sensor will be from the system. In this case, we're in a townhouse. It is multilevel, but the overall footprint isn't too big.

So even though this is an centrally located spot, we are on the back wall. You can see there's a slider or a back slider right here. It's actually, in our purposes, it's really good. It's close to the front door, a few footsteps away. We're going to have our 30 second entry delay to get to this panel will be plenty of time. And we have a garage door entrance that's a little closer. So either entrance point, whether it's a back door or the front door of the garage, you'll have easy access to the panel.

Because that's the other consideration. When you think about where it put it, you want it centrally located for range. But you also want to in a good spot that's going to be convenient for the homeowner or the end user so that they can get to the panel, disarm it in a timely manner, and can take advantage of all the cool features that the Lyric offers like weather, news, traffic at the panel. You know, that nice, brilliant touchscreen, you'll be able to control it and use it in this location. We're the living room, so it's convenient as well as a good spot in terms of range.

So now that we've reviewed where it's going, why it's going there, and what tools we're going to use to do this insulation, let's jump in. So when we're mounting our panel to the wall, on the back of the panel, there's a back plate. So on the LYNC Touch, it was more of a clamshell. The whole unit opened up.

On this one, it's got a removable back plate. And then everything else is internal here. So you don't actually open it up. You're not looking at the circuit board in this case.

Because they've built the Wi-Fi and the Zwave right into the circuit board, there's no need to open it up and add modules. If you are going to add the cellular, it actually fits into the side here. So this little piece pops out. So they're trying to make it where you don't need to actually get to the internal circuitry of the panel. And everything is done just by accessing the back panel here.

And this back plate that we have is what we can use to mount to the wall. And once it's mounted, then we can hang our panel and get this fixed to the wall. You can see there's screw holes, two at the top, two at the bottom. So basically you want to get this at the intended mounting height, which is a mixture of industry standard and also convenience.

Industry standard will have you putting it slightly lower to make sure that anyone with a disability, perhaps in a wheelchair, would have access to the system. In our purposes, our customers want it a little bit higher. So we're going to this mounting height. And you could see already traced this on the wall, but I'm trying to match it up. And you can see we're nice and level, which is important. You want to make this nice and neat on the wall when they're going to use it.

And so we've outlined or traced this hole here, which is where our actual power wire is going to come in. And then we've outlined this bigger hole because ideally, this is all we would need to make for a hole. But when we're doing our fishing with our wire, we can't-- it's going to be a lot harder to hit to this one spot. So we're going to make a bigger hole when we use our drywall saw so that we have a little bit more of an access hole to hopefully help us with our fishing of the wire from the outlet up to here.

So you determine your installation height. You make sure it's level. And just with the back plate on the wall, you trace out your spots. And you're ready to go to cut your holes and see if you can get wire up to this location.

So you don't have a shot of the outlet now, but we'll get a close up view of it when we do our fish. But I do want to briefly go over what we did to prepare our outlet. So as described, the panel needs to be plugged or wired to that transformer or power supply, two pronged power supply, which plugs right into an outlet.

You can see it has this little screw at the top, with this little red nylon washer. And what that's used for is most wall outlets have a screw right in the middle. And when you-- and that's just the screw to hold the wall plate or the outlet plate to the actual outlet. So when you take that screw out, you can plug this into the bottom outlet and then screw this, which will hold this to the wall plate and make sure that it doesn't get unplugged.

Because when this is installed, all you'll see is this unit. You won't see any wire coming out. And if you weren't right by your panel, this could just look like a random device plugged into an outlet. And therefore, when someone's looking for a spot to plug the vacuum in or spot to put their phone charger, they may say, well, I don't know what this is. Doesn't look like it's connected to anything. And they'll just unplug it.

And obviously, if this is your system power, you wouldn't want someone to actually take your system down because of that reason by accident. So that's why they put the screw. Just so someone-- it would give someone pause and think maybe I should unplug this unit because there's a reason it's connected.

So we're going to try to always plug it to the bottom outlet so you can use that screw to hold it to the wall plate. And it's nice because this hangs down. So when this is plugged into this bottom of the outlet, this will hang down a bit. And what we could do is put a hole in the wall roughly this big that we can then fish our wire. And that way the wire comes into the back of this and when you're plugged in, you won't even see the hole or the wires. So that's the best way to do the installation here.

And we've actually put that hole in the wall already. And by doing-- the reason we did that beforehand was we of course wanted to cut power or flip the breaker to this outlet. And we did that to make sure we're not going to have any problems. Because, of course, this is a low voltage, but because we're near an outlet, we wanted to make sure we're not going to cut through a wire that's live, high voltage wire, or have any issues, electrical shock issues.

So we cut power to the breaker. We verified that our outlet had no power. And then we removed the wall plate from the outlet. And at that point, we could see that the wires coming to this plug were coming from above and not from the bottom. And therefore, when we used our drywall saw to cut our hole for our wire, we knew where we're going to be cutting through any wire.

So this is playing near an outlet. Definitely something to be very careful with. Make sure you know what you're doing. And make sure that you have your power cut or turned off before you do that.

Even with the power off, you can make mistakes. You know, you can cut your power going to the outlet. So that's why, again, it's important that you kind of take your outlet apart. And really take a close look at how the wires are coming in, whether they're coming from the top or from the bottom. And then make sure that when you're making any holes for your wire, that you're not going to be cutting through any of that wire.

So we already have all that prepped. We're going to show you the actual fishing. And now we're going to show you how to make this top hole, which I said we'll make it a little bit bigger. We have our footprint, our stencil here of our back plate. And we're going to basically cut a hole here, which you won't see when the panel is there. But it will give us a nice big hole so we can easily fish our wire in.

So we have our drywall saw here. And basically you-- it's got a nice sharp tip. And you just kind of give it a little bang on the handle to get it into the wall. And then this is just a very easy saw to work with in the wall to cut out this drywall.

We don't have any outlets, wires, anything near here. So be careful as you're doing this. But we've already planned in advance to make sure that we're not going to have any unexpected issues cutting into anything that could be bad. You get to the corner and you do another little jam in and then cut up. Around another corner. Jam it in, cut across. And then our last corner. Jam it in and cut down. All right.

Drywall popped out. We've got a nice hole. You can see there's quite a bit of insulation behind here, which we cut into a bit. But that's fine. We're actually going to make sure we pull that back off the wall a bit. We're going to try to get our fish to run along the wall in between the insulation and the wall so we don't get caught up in that insulation as we try to feed our wire up into here.

So now we have a nice hole. We can fit our hand in here. So when we fish it, we'll see it and we'll be able to grab it and pull it through. If we just had that very tiny little hole right here, now we're trying to hit a very small spot with that fish, a lot more difficult.

So obviously a bigger patch if you ever take the panel down. But you're going to be patching the hole either way. It's a lot easier if you make it nice and big like this, and then you're able to get that wire to come through nice and easy.

So we're all prepped. We have our hole that we prepped prior to the video down by the outlet. We have our big hole here. And we're going to show you how to connect your wire to your fish tape and fish it up through the two holes so that we know we have our wire coming for our outlet to our panel location. We can put our back plate onto the wall and get everything connected.

All right. So we're going to show you what's involved with trying to fish our wire from this hole here up the wall and come out that hole that we just made, which will be behind the panel so that this wire will not be visible. All you'll see is the panel on the wall and a transformer plugged into this outlet.

So we talked a bit about this power supply and how it works. And basically, as described, this outlet has a screw hole in the middle. So we remove this screw hole. And when we plug this in, this screw will replace that one that's there now. And this screw will hold this to the outlet so that when it's plugged in and screwed in, no one will accidentally unplug this, which would potentially drop power to your system.

Also we talked about the length of this power supply. So you can see when this is plugged in, this hole that we've made will be completely covered, which makes it for a nice installation. Because obviously we need the hole to get our fish. And because we made the hole big enough to be able to work with on the fish, we obviously don't want that hole to be visible. But the way that it works when you're on the bottom plug, if your hole is right below the plug, because this hangs down, it makes for a nice blocking of the hole.

So we have some tape here, some electrical tape. And we want to just basically tape our wire to the end of our fish tape. And you want to tape it in such a way that no wire is exposed because you don't want it to snag on anything in the wall. But you want this nice and tight so once you get that fish in the wall, your wire doesn't come undone. So we're just going to wrap this a few times. And so now we have a nice smooth end.

Nothing that will catch in the wall. And our wire is secure. So the idea is we put this in the hole, and we come up the wall. And it will pop out in the hole behind the panel. And therefore, we'll be able to pull our wire through and have a nice, clean installation without any visible wire.

So this fish is kind of a metal flexible rod here that we just insert. And there is insulation in this wall. So if we feel it, the insulation has some paper, which touches the drywall. And we want to try to get this behind that paper so we're not trying to fight through all the insulation in the wall up to that spot. If we can get in between the insulation and the wall right in that little cavity, it should make for the easiest fish up into our other spot.

And they call it fishing for a reason. Because it takes patience and some finesse. But we'll see how we can do here.

So when fishing, best made plans don't always come to fruition. We had planned for this smaller hole to be our entry point, and then our bigger hole up top to be kind of where we'll have a little more give so if we don't hit to the exact same spot, we can just grab it and pull it through. And what we're finding is because our outlet box is right above this hole, and because when we did our drywall saw hole here the insulation kind of got a little, not mangled, but kind of got a little bunched up.

So when we're trying to come at this angle, we're having to get in right above this outlet box. So we're trying to hit at an angle and up, and then go up through there. And because of the nature of the fish tool, we're not really able to get it into a good angle. Because right now, it's shooting this way. If we try to get it to come the side of the box, it's not really going well. So instead of going from here up, we're actually going to try the opposite.

So because of the insulation and not being able to really get this piece in between the drywall and insulation, it was getting up into the insulation. It was getting jammed up. So because our hole is a little easier to work with and see what's going on up top here, what we're going to do is, our insulation, you can see that it's got this paper. And this paper, as long as we're in between that paper and the drywall, there's a nice easy cavity for it to just slide down and come out that hole.

So we're going to be shooting for a smaller hole. The whole idea of the bigger hole at the exit point is a good idea normally. But again, sometimes when you get into this, you find you run into snags and you have to change your plans. So now what we're going to do is slide it through the big hole and angle it down towards the outlet.

We looked earlier and this fish tape is measured. So we knew anywhere from 23 to 25 feet, which is-- it's a 25 foot fish. So two to three feet down is where we should be near the outlet. So I'm going to kind of just push it down, trying to angle towards the outlet because the outlet is not directly below us. And once I see that I'm approaching the 22 foot mark, which is right up here, I would know that I'm close.

I'm hitting something, which I believe is my outlet box. So I'm either hitting the top of the outlet or I'm running into something else. But either way, I'm close so I'm just going to pull this back out and try to shoot and hit just to the left of that so I don't hit the outlet box, and I instead come down the left side of the box so I can hit through my hole.

And that time, I just used my fingers to kind of hold my fish tape so it would hit a little bit more of a left hand angle. And now the trick is just to get this to come out the hole. Of course we want to do this-- this outlet, we have made sure has no power. Never want to be sticking your fingers around a live outlet.

But with it turned off, I have both my fingers in here. And I've grabbed the tape. If I can get just a little bit more slack here. You can see working with such a small hole why the theory of trying to hit to the bigger exit hole was a good one. But we're going to make do.

And success, we have our wire taped still to our fish. And we now have wire run through the wall. It's got easy play. And we have exactly what we need. So all we have to do now is remove the tape, cut our wire, and then we can connect our transformer to this end, our panel to this end. And we'll have everything-- we'll have exactly what we need. Wire through the hole-- through the wall so it's not so visible at all when the panel is installed.

So success. A little bit different than we originally planned. But now you can get a sense of what you'll be dealing with when you do your wire fish. And certainly, if you have questions, let us now. But that's how to do the wire fish.

All right. So we've untaped our wire from our fish. And therefore we can just pull the fish tape out, wind this back up. And we have our wire through our wall, ready to proceed to the panel mounting to the wall.

That fish is the very-- is the most difficult thing you'll do on a lyric installation. But with the right tools and the right idea of what you're doing, it's really not that difficult. You certainly don't need to hire anyone. Anyone with the right tools, and these are not expensive tools, easily available at Home Depot, Lowe's, something like that. So now that you know what you're going to do, anybody with the right tools and the right know-how can get that wire fished so it looks nice and neat.

And of course, there are other ways that you could install the system. You could put the transformer in upside down on the outlet and put the wire exposed on the wall, and come in right through the back of the panel and use some wire track. And you'd hide the wire, you'd have the wire track showing. But that's a way to do it if you didn't want to try to do all of this.

There's even a desk mount option for the Lyric. So we don't have it on this one yet for the beta, but they're going to have a little back angle mount so that it'll sit on a table and have a nice angle to use it. And then, of course, you're just plugging into a wall with an exposed wire. So if you had it in the office or something, that's another option.

So there's plenty of options to install a Lyric without having to do all of this. But if you want to make it neat and you want to do it professional like this, this is the way to do it.

So now that we have the wire ran, we're just going to cut this wire. We have plenty of extra wire here. Make sure this doesn't fall back down into your wall cavity. You don't want to undo all that good fishing you just did.

But we're going to use our back plate, our level, and our pencil now. So we feed this wire through this little oval shape here. We can use our little bit of a stencil that we had left over from before, although most of that got-- most of that isn't useful anymore now that we did the drywall hole.

So we just want to make sure we're as level as possible so it looks as neat as possible on the wall. And then we can mark our screw hole spots. Oops. Making sure you don't move it in between each hole. And you can always, with your screws, when you finally mount it, you can always make slight adjustments so it's perfectly level at the end. So the important thing is just to mark your four holes as best you can with the level and the back plate.

So now that they're marked, you can see there's the bigger portion at the bottom and the skinnier portion at the top. This way you can kind of slide it and latch it down into place. But we now have our four screw holes.

And we're going to do one more here, which is a back tamper. So the panel has a case tamper. If the front plate got removed from the back plate, it would go into temporal alarm. But this little piece of plastic here, you can see it's got 1, 2, 3, 4 little plastic bridges from this piece in the middle to the back plate. And the idea is you put this-- ah.

In our case, we won't be able to use this really because there's not a stud there. But if you had this lined up and accessible to a stud right behind here, you could put a nice long screw into your stud through your drywall. And if someone tried to rip the whole panel off, because the screw is tight to the wall, to the stud, this four bits of plastic would rip away. And your screws that are just in the drywall would break away. But because you're screwed into your stud, this piece of plastic would tear from the panel.

And so when the panel got ripped away, there's a little tamper switch on the back of the system that would no longer be getting held down because this piece would stay stuck to your stud. And you would have some back wall tamper protection that way in case someone did rip it down like that. In our case, we do not have a stud right behind here. So it's not really going to work for us.

So we're just going to focus on the regular tamper that's inside the panel. But we have our four screw holes now, so we can use our drill to drill our holes and then mount our back plate to our drywall here.

So now that we have our four holes marked, this bag comes with the Lyric installation. And inside this bag, there's a few items. First of all, we get this question a lot with the LYNX Touch, so I'm sure we'll get the same with the Lyric, is what do I do with this weird thing that was in the panel box that I have no idea what it is?

And it looks like a little brown device with wires coming out of both ends. And on the LYNX Touch, there's only one. On the Lyric, you'll actually see two in this baggy. And what these are are resistors. And they're used for the hardwired zones that the panel supports.

So if you had an existing wired contact in your house that you wanted to try to tie right into the panel. Because let's say this door had an old wired contact and you're right near the panel, so it's easy to get another wire, you could do that instead of having to buy another wireless contact. And this resistor is used to supervise the wiring between the sensor and the panel.

So for most people that are getting the Lyric, they're getting it because it's a wireless system. They don't want to use any wired sensors. You don't have to use these resistors at all unless you're using either zone one or two, which are the two hardwired zones.

The other thing we have this bag is five screws and five wall anchors. And that's for the four mounting and the one drywall screw if you wanted to use it for the back case tamper. And then there's a smaller little screw in here too. So there's five of the same kind of screw, and five of the wall anchors, and then there's one smaller screw, which you actually use at the bottom of the panel.

You can screw the back plate into the panel here with this tiny little screw. And that will hold it in place so that someone couldn't pop it open easily. They would actually have to unscrew it. So we'll put that in as well.

So now we're going to show you drilling holes, installing your wall anchors, and screwing the back to the wall. All right. So we have our power drill with our drill bit. This happens to have a level on it. So we want to be in as straight as possible on all four of these holes, which we've marked on the back plate. And then we can push our wall anchors in and screw our back plate to the wall.

I want to make sure on this hole, because we're close to our wire, be very careful. We certainly don't want to drill through our wire and ruin our fish. Again, with this wire here, be careful that we're not drilling into the wire. Just move it to the side of it. And then the last one.

We've got our four holes. We may need to make these a little bit wider depending on the anchors. But I just wanted to get them drilled and then see what happens here.

So we got our wall anchor. And if we push it in. We want this to be tight. So if you go a little too big, then you can't really undo it. If you go a little bit too small and you can't push this all the way in, you can always jump up a drill bit size and then try to redo it. Or even with the same drill bit if you kind of work it around a bit, you can get a bigger hole.

In this case, it's pretty close. I'm just going to use a hammer to get it flush with the wall. You want this wall anchored recessed so it's flush. So when the panel is flat against the wall, there's no wiggle or give to it.

In this case, we used the 3/16 drill bit, which looks like it was the perfect size. Certainly not too big, as we're needing to use the hammer to get it in. And not too small where a size up would've been better. I think 3/16 looks like a pretty good size for these wall anchors that come with the unit.

Be careful here. This is kind of our weakest part of the drywall based on our hole. We don't want to hit this too hard where we break this drywall in. So I'm just being a little more careful on this one.

All right. We have four flush holes for our mounting screws. That's going to hold the back plate to the wall.

So we've changed out our drill bit for a screw bit and Phillips head. And we have our screws. Our wall anchors are set in the wall. And we're just going to screw these in almost all the way just to have a little bit showing, just about 1/4 of an inch out. That way we can fit the panel in, lock it in place, and then give them one more hit to get them tight to the wall.

All right. So screws are in. Just a few turns out on each. We've got our nice handy back plate here. Instead of with the LYNX Touch, you had the whole unit. They make it easy, we can just fish our wire through the whole here. And then line up our four holes, lock it into place.

And before we screw them down tight, we can give one more adjustment on the level to make sure that it's going to be as level as possible on the wall. So you can see somehow we're off just a tad. But with just a little bit of a minor adjustment and some pressure when we lock these in the place. When using a power drill, you want to be careful. You don't want to overtighten these. But you do want them tight.

I've seen people where they overtighten them and it actually warps the back plate a bit, which could cause problems with your case tamper. So you don't want to flex the back. In fact, even that one I might have just done a little too much. You'll see as soon as you go to tight, it'll flex this back plastic. And you'll know you went a little too far.

But now we have a nice level back plate secure to the wall. It's not going anywhere.

You have a little tab at the bottom here. And this is a nice little feature for your installation that Honeywell added. They call it the third hand. And it's a little piece of plastic, flexible plastic. You can actually hang the panel down from there. So if you were doing programming or you were hooking anything up, making your wired connections, it's holding to the back plate so you can use your other two free hands to make your connections here.

So we now have our back plate mounted. You can see our hole came perfect where our wires coming in through the back here. It's going to connect to these terminals here for power. We've got our battery.

On the LYNX Touch, you used to have to install this battery and fit a piece of plastic to hold it down. On the Lyric, they made it a little bit easier. All you have to do is just plug this clip into this three pronged port. You can't mess this up. There's only one way it fits. So you just kind of stick it down into place and plug it in.

You should always plug the battery in before your DC transformer is putting power to the panel. So I went ahead and just got the battery connected first. And now I'm going to point a few things out here.

So one is this tamper. So this switch here is an actual push button. And on the circuit board is a tamper switch. So if this gets removed from the wall plate, this little piece of plastic that sticks out holds this switch down. So when the panel is closed up, it's in place. If someone were to open the front from the back, this will pull away from here and then you'll get a cover tamper, letting you know someone's messing with your system.

If this was screwed in here to a wall stud, and instead of opening the panel, they ripped the whole panel off, because these are just screws with wall anchors through the drywall, with enough force, those would just ripped out. But if this is all the way into a stud, that piece of plastic would hold to the stud, everything else would rip away. And again, because this piece left behind, that has the post that holds down the tamper, you would get a wall tamper.

I mean it's the same-- it'll report as the same taper. But basically you're case tamper protected and you're wall tamper protected when you're installed to a stud properly. We didn't do that here. But hopefully that's enough of an explanation on the theory behind that. So if you did install it right on the stud there, you could be secure both ways.

On this strip of screw terminals internally here, we talked earlier about how this Lyric panel has no option for a barrel plug input. Like if you've seen the LT cable, which is a premade cable that allows you to plug in the LYNX Touch panel without stripping wire and splicing it, the Lyric does not have that option. So you're going to have to connect your power wire, which will be connected to your transformer plugged in the outlet. You're going to have to splice it in to these screw terminals.

And basically there's an input on the back here. When you undo the screw, it opens up. You stick your wiring in and you screw it down, and it holds it nice and tight. So these are easy to work with. You just have to be able to strip your wire and know where you're connecting here.

So on this strip there's five terminals labeled HWZ2, GND, HWZ1, +9VDC and GND. And what these five terminals are for is HWZ2 and HWZ1 is Hard Wire Zone 1 and Hard Wire Zone 2. Each wired zone is a two-wired connection from the sensor, the door contact, into the panel.

And one connection would go to HW1-- I'm sorry. Your connection would go to HWZ1 and ground or GND, the one that's in between the two hardware zones, or HWZ2 and ground. So they're going to share the ground. And the HWZ2-- or HWZ1 is the positive side of that zone. So if you had two sensors, you would have your two wires coming in. Both sets of wires from the contacts would have one wire going to GND and then one wire going to HWZ2 and HWZ1.

The +9VDC and the GND all the way to the right, that's another ground and your positive +9VDC power coming from your nine volt DC transformer. So that's what 9VDC means, 9 volts DC Current. So we talked how your transformer is going to take your 120 volts from the outlet and take it down to 9 volts for the transformer because the panel accepts 9 volts.

So we just have to strip our wire here and then we can make our connections. So when stripping the wire, you just want to go back a couple inches. And at the base of any stripper, you have a sharp cutter that you can use to put a little pressure, making sure not to nick the internal conductor, but basically strip off the insulating sheath.

And then we have our two 18 gauge conductors internally here. Red for positive is convention, and black for negative. So we're going to use that. And we just want to strip 18 gauge, we want to strip this jacket, this red jacket off so we just have to expose wire.

And we're going to do maybe 1/2 inch, just so we have enough exposed to make a good connection into our screw terminal and not have any extra exposed to potentially short anything out or have any issues. So 1/4 inch, 1/2 inch on each, black and red. Because this is stranded wire, we're going to twist it at the end to make a nice tight connection so it doesn't get all frayed and jumbled up when we're inserting it into the holes.

And of course, when we're doing this, we're-- we haven't even connected our transfer on the other side. So these are not powered. There's no potential issue with connecting to the wrong terminals. There's no power, no juice on this wire at all. So always urge you to make these connections at the panel before you make the transformer connections and before you ever plug the transformer into the wall.

Now that we've stripped our wire, we're going to loosen up these terminals. This terminal strip uses actually a flat head screwdriver. So we talked earlier how this screwdriver happens to have double-ended Phillips head/flat head on both with various sizes, a smaller side and a bigger side. So we use the flat head and we open up this terminal. I don't know if the video is the going to be able to catch this, but as you open these terminals up, it actually elongates down on the bottom. And you now have a little cavity at the top to insert your wire.

And again, on most Honeywell systems, they're AC transformers with no polarity. So when you're connecting your power from your transformer to your panel, it doesn't matter positive or negative. You just have to make your two connections. With the Lyric panel, just like on a LYNX Touch panel, it is polarity because it's a DC transformer. So you want to make sure that you're connecting red to +9VDC and then screwing it down tight.

And again, you really don't want any exposed wire to be showing outside of the terminal there. So that's why I said about 1/4 inch, maybe 1/2 inch stripping at the end there. And that way you have your insulating red jacket with no extra wire exposed. And then your negative side or your black wire goes to the last GND terminal all the way to the right. And GND, again, stands for ground.

And we screw this down nice and tight. We don't want these wires to ever come loose accidentally or over time. We don't want them to ever fall out. So we want to make sure this is tight as possible without going overboard. But nice, tight connection.

Give a little tug. You shouldn't have any slack. Neither conductor should come out at all with a little tug. All right.

So we fished or pushed this wire into the cavity behind the panel there into the wall. We can disconnect our third hand. And there's three tabs at the top that fit into three notches at the top of the panel.

We've already made our battery connection so we won't have to get back in here. And we latch it at the top. Make sure we're not pinching the wire on the back by, again, putting it deep into the cavity here. And you can always pull down below.

And now our Lyric is nicely installed on the wall, secure to the back plate. This panel is not going anywhere. We can close it up, finish off the insulation by using this smaller screw. So in that bag of screws that comes with the Lyric, you'll have five of the same size screw and one slightly-- well, one much smaller screw. And that smaller screw goes up underneath.

A little tricky to get to the screw underneath the panel. But you want to just get it as tight in there as possible. So that now if someone puts pressure from the bottom or from the top, this thing is not moving off. And if anyone ever did have to get inside there, instead of just being able to pop it off and potentially defeat the system or try to defeat the system, you wouldn't have as much easy access. You would have to undo the screw first.

So our Lyric is installed on the wall. And we're ready to give it power and evaluate the boot up sequence here.

OK. So we're back down by outlet. We have our panel installed on the wall. We have our wire fished through the wall. And we have our transformer that we're going to plug into the outlet, connect our wires, give power to our system.

So first thing we're going to do is get our wire ready. So again, we're going to use our wire strippers. And I go about two inches back on the outside jacket. Use the cutting feature of the wire strippers to remove this exterior jacket or insulating sheath to get access to the internal conductors, the black and the red.

And we have plenty of extra wire here. And if you ever nick your jacket or whatever, very easy, just cut another length, redo your connections. When you have it exposed with a good couple inches here, it makes it a lot easier to manipulate and hook up your wires to the terminals.

It's very important on the backside of this transformer, a lot of people fail to realize that there is a polarity, a positive and a negative side of this. So you don't see it on the terminals themselves, but on this Honeywell sticker right on the back of the transformer, you can see a small circle with a positive and a small circle with a negative. Negative on the left, positive on the right. And the colors, we're using convention for low voltage. So positive is red the negative is black. Of course,

If you reverse it up top, it doesn't really matter what color use. It's just important that whatever color wire you have connected to +9VDC internally in the panel goes to the positive screw terminal on the transformer. And whatever wire you have connected to GND or ground up at the panel would go to negative or the negative power terminal on the transformer. So again, color doesn't really matter. It's much more important that you have the proper terminals connected to the proper screw terminals on this transformer.

We're using 18 gauge wire, which in our case, we have a very short run. So we're not going to have any voltage drop issues or any problems with power using an 18 gauge wire from this location up to that location. So now we want to strip the internal conductors. I'm going to go about an inch.

Internally in the panel, I said to go about 1/2 inch to 1/4 inch. And that's because in those screw terminals, you don't have much depth. So when you put them in and you screw them down, you don't want any exposed wire to be sticking out. If you did a full inch at the panel, maybe 1/2 inch would be covered and you'd have exposed wire externally. And if somehow the exposed wire on your other wire touched, you could have issues.

So we recommend only 1/2 inch, 1/4 inch in the panel. However, when you are hooking it up at the transformer side, I find that a full inch is easier to work with. And I'll show you here why I say that in a second once I get both the black and the red stripped back.

All right. Again, we have stranded wire, which means there's multiple strands. It's not one big wire, one solid core wire. And we want to give it a nice twirl in the direction that it's already twirled so it's a nice tight connection. We don't want any frayed or loose ends at the end. So just give it a couple twist with your finger. And we have nice, tight, exposed wire here.

And the reason I say to make this a little bit bigger is to make as good contact to these terminals as possible. So we're going to use our Phillips head. And we're going to loosen up the screw terminals so that we have this kind of washer here with a little bit of space to the screw.

And basically, with this extra length of wire, what I recommend is use your screwdriver and make a nice little fish hook at the end of the wire. So you get a nice little hook here. And I find that when you use this hook shape, you can kind of fit it around the top of the opened up screw terminal.

And then with the hook, it's hooked around the screw. And when you screw it down tight, we're using the hook in the direction that you'll be screwing the screw down so it doesn't become-- it's not fighting against each other to unscrew the wrong way. And when you tighten it, you're getting a lot more surface area or a lot more connection, a lot more surface connection between the exposed wire and the actual screw. So that's just a nice little industry trick there to get a really good connection at the transformer.

And same as we set up in the panel, we want these connections tight. We are going to screw this outlet to the wall plate so it doesn't get unplugged accidentally. But whatever we can do to minimize these connections from coming loose is ideal.

So without overtightening, you don't want to do it-- you know, brute force it, but a nice tight connection. And you've got plenty of exposed wire touching the screw terminal. As long as you have some wire touching the screw terminal, it should work. But the more you have, the better.

So I'm just trying to clean that up as best I can and then screw it down tight. And you can see on the back, you can see some exposed. But when this is like this, you wont see that at all. And obviously you've got a little plastic retainer in between. So this wire is not going to touch this wire over here.

Same idea on the black. We make our little fish hook. Hooked to the right because we're going to screw our screw down to the right. Righty tighty, lefty loosey. So we fit our hook up towards the top of the negative terminal, the negative screw, the ground.

With some patience and determination we've got our black and our red connected. Red to positive, connected to +9VDC in the panel. Black to negative, connected to GND in the panel. And then we can feed our wire into the cavity. And when we plug in, these two conductors here are going to be hidden on the back here. And you won't see this at all.

We're going to remove this wall plate with our flat head screw. So we're going to take this screw totally out. It's got a little washer on the back we just have to remove. That screw comes out. This has a washer, so take that out. And then we can fit that screw so that when it's plugged in, it won't come away from the outlet. We switch it back to Phillips. And we're all ready to plug this in.

I'm going to have my partner flip the breaker, this outlet will be live again. And we're going to plug it in and screw in the wire. And then the panel will boot up. So all ready, plug this in, screw in the screw.

And then we'll take this-- we have a camera on the boot up that we'll show you. We can always power cycle and show you again. But we're going to take a look at how neat this looks once everything is connected.

So we plug it in. We screw our screw to the wall outlet plate so that no one will accidentally or inadvertently remove this transformer from the wall outlet. We still have access to our top outlet. And looking at this from underneath and from the sides, you really can't tell that there's a hole there and that there's wire connecting this up to the panel. So we have as neat of an installation as possible.

And you can see that we now have power to our panel, which is booting up. We just saw a blue Lyric screen. So just like with the LYNX Touch, takes a few seconds to power up. We've notice this boot up sequence is a little bit longer than the Lyric. We're assuming more features, more processing to load in the beginning. Luckily, you're not going to have a lot of reasons to be power cycling the system.

But we're at the system standby now. Same like on a LYNX Touch, pressing and holding the Home button pushes it over to ready to arm. And if we go to Settings, I can turn his brightness up so you guys can see as good as possible. Turn the volume down a little bit and save that.

And there is our Lyric, Honeywell Lyric installation of the control panel to the power supply. This 950 COM trouble is a communication error. That's because we haven't initiated any monitoring for this system yet. The Lyric system is going to work much better when monitored than just as a local system. So it's kind of looking for that right out the gate. And of course, we do have no contract monitoring plans that support this system if you're looking for that.

But that is our full installation of our Lyric all-in-one wireless control panel going to our wall transformer to provide power to the system. We've shown you how to fish the wire from the transformer to the panel. How to make your connections for the battery internally as a backup battery, as well as the power wires internally to the panel. And we now have a working Honeywell Lyric system.

So we've hoped you've enjoyed this installation video. If you have any questions when installing your Lyric panel, please let us know. And make sure to subscribe to our channel so you're kept up to date with all of the new Lyric videos that we'll be releasing.