Lyric Security System: Mounting Controller to Backplate

So, we now have our backplate mounted. You can see our hole came perfect where our wire is 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 just 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-prong port. You can't mess this up, there's only one way it fits. So, you just 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 is 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 the wall anchors to the drywall, with enough force, those would just rip 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'll report as the same tamper 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 can 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. If you've seen the LT cable, which is a pre-made 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 into 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 wire 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-wire connection from the sensor, the door contact, into the panel. And one connection will go to HW1 or HWZ1 or HWZ...I'm sorry. Your connection will go to HWZ1 and ground, or GND, the one that's in between the two hardwired 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 9-volt DC transformer. So that's what 9V DC 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 kind of like 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 the exposed wire. And we're going to do maybe half-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, quarter-inch, half-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 haven't even connected our transformer 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 I 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 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 a 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 quarter-inch, maybe half-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 a 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 push 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 backplate. This panel is not going anywhere. We can close it up, finish off the installation 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 this 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 things 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'd have to undo the screw, first.