Lyric Security System: Tools Needed for Installation

Hi DIYers, Sterling with alarm grade 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 touch screen 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 get the 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 are 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 the Lynx touch or a Honeywell Lyric panel. Once this panel's 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 you know 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 yourself, or 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 that 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 can be flipped from a flat head to a Phillips.

So you don't need this exact tool but a small Phillips head and flathead 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 marking our spot on our wall, which you can see we all ready did. We'll go back over how we determine its location and show you how it's done, but we have a pencil for that. We have a stud finder, which we use to verify that there were no studs in between our panel location, and the outlet that we were 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 location for installation, we made sure with our stud finder that we didn't have any studs in between where the outlet is, and where the installation 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. Make sure that when we mount our panel it's nice and flat and level on the wall, and we have a dry wall 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's when it's on the wall, all you're going to see is the 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 pre-made cable from Honeywell that we offer on our site and it has a barrel plug input on one end 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 on to the screw terminals on this transformer, and it made for a nice easy insulation.

You didn't have to worry about stripping wire and connecting the wires to the screw terminals. For the Lyric, they remove that option. We're hoping and we've urged them to consider putting that kind of barrel plug input 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's labeled 18 dash two or slash two, which is 18 gauge.

That's the thickness of the wire and two, that means its two conductor, and it's 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 okay to put this in the wall and when we talk about wire, typically you have a few different designations. You have stranded verse solid. Solid means that the wire has a solid core, and if that wire gets caught, 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 little more flexible using stranded. The solid core typically is 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. 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, to skinny or too far overrun.

So we want 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 got to make sure you have your fish tape for that if you're going to be doing this.