Lyric Security System: Mounting Backplate to the Wall

So, now that we have the wire in, we're just going to cut this wire. We have plenty of extra wire here. Make sure this doesn't fall back down in your wall cavity, you don't want to undo all that good fishing you just did. But we're going to use our backplate, 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 have left over from before, although most of that got...also, 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 between each hole. 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 backplate. So now that they're marked, you can see there's the bigger portion at the bottom and the skinnier portion at the top, that's the way you can 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 backplate, it would go into tamper alarm. But this little piece of plastic here, you can see it's got one, two, three, four little plastic bridges from this piece in the middle to the backplate. And the idea is you put this...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 stud, these four bit 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 backplate to our dry wall 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 you have 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 1 or 2, which are the two hardwired zones.

The other thing we have in 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 backplate 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 your holes, installing your wall anchors and screwing the backplate 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 backplate, and then we can push our wall anchors in and screw our backplate to the wall.

You want 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 a bit...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've 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 anchor 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 use the 3/16th 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 3/16th 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 backplate to the wall.

So we've changed 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 a quarter 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 backplate here instead of the LYNX Touch, you have the whole unit. They make it easy, we can just fish our wire through the hole here, and then line up our four holes, lock it into place. And before we screw them down tight, we can get 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 into place...when using a power drill you want to be careful. You don't want to over-tighten these, but you do want them tight. I've seen people where they over-tighten them, and it actually warps the backplate 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 think I might've just a little too much.

You'll see, as soon as you go too tight, it'll flex this back plastic and you'll know you went a little too far. But now we have a nice, level backplate secured 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're hooking anything up, making your wired connections, it's holding to the backplate so you can use your two free hands to make your connections here.