Lyric SIXCT: Front Door Installation

Hi DIYers, Sterling with AlarmGrid here, and today we're going to show you how to install a 6CT wireless door or window sensor onto our front door here to protect our front door with our Honeywell Lyric installation. So this 6CT contact is a 6 series sensor that's used with the Honeywell Lyric system and we're going to use this up in this top left corner of the door. When we install a door contact, ideally we want the magnet on the moving portion or the door and we want the sensor on the frame. And the reason for that is if we slam the door, what we're going to be slamming is this magnet which is just a very basic magnet as opposed to slamming the more delicate circuitry inside of the contact. So whenever possible it's better to put the contact on the frame and the magnet on the door.

If you had to for some reason to reverse them, you could, just be careful that you're not going to slam your door. This alternatively could be mounted like this but because we have a little bit of a gap at the top of our door here, we're going to get a better make and break to the magnet and the sensor when we're on the left side here. There's a back plate on this back side of this sensor. There's a little tab at the bottom and if you push the tab towards the back and slide it down, it pops away and we can use this, we all ready traced our holes but we can use this as our template for basically drilling our holes and then we can drill our holes to the back plate and just snap the sensor into place.

When you're determining your installation spot, before you permanently mount it you really want to make sure that you've tested the door opening which would fault the system, and the door closing in the position that you're going to use it. So basically you just want to have a helper, sometimes you need a third hand, but you have someone hold the magnet and someone hold the sensor and you just do a few open and closes in the position where you want it to make sure that you're going to have good connection or good opening and closing of the door to trigger a fault and a restore at the panel.

So we've done that and we know it's...We've done that all ready, we know it's going to work, and this is a wood frame so we are going to drill our screws in because whenever possible screws are better than the double-sided tape. Screws aren't going to come down over time, double-sided tape can fail over the years. However, because this door has a little bit of a metal outer casing, we'd rather not drill into that if we can and we're just going to make sure that we clean the surface with some multi-purpose cleaner and this paper towel so that it's really really clean and also really really dry even more importantly. So we use the other side of the paper towel and we just make sure that that location where we're going to be sticking the magnet with the double-sided tape is really really clean and dry.

Now we remove our back plate from our sensor, and the sensor comes with some mounting screws. There's 2 for the magnet and 4 for the sensor. On the back plate, you have two holes for mounting and you have a third hole which you could use as a case tamper. So if you could get into a stud, if someone ripped the sensor off the wall it would break away the plastic and you would get a tamper indication. For our purposes we don't really need that. This is a residential application. We're not really worried about tampers from the inside. So we're just going to go ahead and screw this into place. So we line up our holes to where we traced and we're just going to screw this wall plate to the wall, to the frame here.

And you do one until not all the way tight. And then you can do the second, using the first as a guide. For this one it's a little more important that when we go tight that it's nice and parallel to the door to make a nice clean installation. So we're going to tighten our top one now and we're going to adjust the bottom to get it as parallel to the frame as we can. And then we can tighten down the bottom and this wall plate isn't going anywhere now. In fact, I think I went just a bit too tight. There was a little bit of a bowing because this lip on the frame is a little bit concave here. We don't want to screw it so tight that it's going to bevel the back plate because we have to pay attention to our tamper and make sure we're not going to have false tamper alerts.

Now that our back plate is affixed, we look on the back and there's a little cutout where this matches up and it goes down into place and now our contact is up where we need it. The final step is to affix our magnet to our door. We've talked about on other install videos, I've kind of failed to talk about it here. I can always pop this off. This sensor has a hash mark here and a hash mark here. On this side there are no hash marks. So we're looking at this very bottom edge, a hash mark here, hash mark here. And that is the side that the magnet needs to install on and that's why we fit it like this.

If this door opened the other way we'd have to flip it around because again we'd have to have the magnet and the sensor on the right position. So we can go ahead and put this back up because we've all ready accounted for that and we know that when we stick our magnet to the door here that it will be in line with the right hash marks. So we have our double-sided tape that came with the sensor and if we peel off the back plastic we can stick this little skinny piece of double-sided tape to the magnet and we can peel off the other end. Now making sure that we're putting this in between the two hash marks, we can press as tight as possible to the door. Give it a nice strong push, we do not want this coming down which would cause false alarms. But now we're installed on our door, and we can open it up. We get a fault on the door, your heard the panel beep for the chime and when we close it, it restores. So we have a good connection and our prior testing before we mounted it made sure that we were good when we were fully installed.

So now that we've verified our sensor works, we did our pretesting before we installed so we knew it would. But it's always nice that things play out as expected, and that is how you install a 6CT wireless door contact for a Honeywell Lyric security system. We hope you've enjoyed this installation video and if you have any questions on installing your 6CT, please email us, support@alarmgrid.com and make sure to subscribe to our channel to keep up-to-date with all of our new Honeywell Lyric installation and programming videos.