Lyric Security System: Booting Up for the First Time

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 our outlet. And 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 the 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. If you ever knicked your jacket or whatever, very easy to just cut another length, re-do 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, and negative is black.

Of course, if you reverse it up top, it doesn't really matter what color you use. It's just important that whatever color wire you have connected to plus 9 VDC 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 a half inch to a quarter 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 half an 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 half an inch, quarter 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 twists 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 these screw terminals so that we have this 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 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 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 the 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 over-tightening-- you don't want to do it-- 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 some exposed. But when this is like this, you won't 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 plus 9 VDC 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 Philips.

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 we're 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, it takes a few seconds to power up. We've noticed 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 this brightness up, so you guys can see it as good as possible. Turn the volume down a little bit. And save that. And there is our 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 looking for that right out of 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 hope you've enjoyed this insulation 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.