Lyric Security System: Picking a Mounting Location

So, now that we've reviewed the tools that we're going to be using, we're going to talk about our chosen insulation 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 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 six 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, and 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 isn't a centrally located spot, we are on the back wall you can see there's a slider, a backslider right here. It's actually in our purposes its good.

It's close to the front door, few footsteps away we're going to ever 30-second entry delay to get to this panel be plenty of time. And we have a garage door entrance that's a little closer so either entrance point, whether it's a backdoor or the front door the garage, you'll have easy access to the panel, because that's the other consideration when you think about where to put it you want to 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 in a timely manner and can take advantage of all the cool features that the Lyric offers, like weather news traffic at the panel , that nice brilliant touchscreen you'll be able to control it, and use it.

In this location where in 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 installation, 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 LYNX 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 built the Wi-Fi and the Z-Wave 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 axing 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 the screw holes so at the top two at the bottom, so you want to get this at the intended mounting height, which is a mixture of industry standard and 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. And our purposes our customers wanted a little bit higher so we're going to this mounting height, and you can see we 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 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 dry wall 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 insulation 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 so you can get your 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 prong 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 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 a spot to put their phone charger they may , "Well, I don't know what this is. It doesn't look like it's connected anything." And they'll just unplug it. And obviously if this is your system power, you wouldn't want someone 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 shouldn't 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 the bottom of the outlet, this will hang down a bit. And what we can do is put a hole into the wall roughly this big that we can then fish or wire. In that way, the wire comes into the back of this and on...and when you're plugged , you want to 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. 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 of issues, electrical shock issues.

So, we cut power to the breaker. We verified that are out they 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 use our dry wall saw to cut our hole for a wire, we knew we weren't going to be cutting through any wire. So this is a plane 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 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 coming from the top or from the bottom. And then make sure that when you're making any holes for you wire that you're not going to cut into 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 the top hole which I said will make 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 dry wall saw here and basically, 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, just a very easy saw to work within the wall to cut out this dry wall. 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 the corner and doing a little jam and then cut up around the corner, drill in. Cut across.

And then out last corner, jam it in and cut down. All right. Dry wall popped out and we got a nice hole. You can see there's quite 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 will 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 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 to the two holes, so that we know we have our wire coming from our outlet to our panel location. We can put our back plate onto the wall and get everything connected.