Using a Honeywell 4219 Zone Expander on a VISTA-50P

Hi, DIYers. Joe from Alarm Grid. And today were going to talk about how to use a 4219 Zone Expander with your Honeywell VISTA-50P. The answer is you can't. That's because the Zone Expander, the 4219 Zone Expander, doesn't work with polling loop handles. This right up here is our 4219 Zone Expander. This would work great on a VISTA-15P, a 20P, a 21iP. But it's not going to work for a 50P. For a 50P, we need something like the 4208SN. This is an 8 zone, polling loop, or VPlex Zone Expander. What polling loop is it's a feature on the panel that allows you to get more zones from the system by connecting these devices via a wire back to the designated terminals on your 50P. It's a cool feature. Basically, it just allows you to get more hardwired zones out of the system. On your 50p, you're going to have 9 hardwired zones on the panel board and the terminals ready to go out of the box. But that panel can support up to 86 zones. So this means that there's 77 zones that you're not going to be able to use on the panel right out of the box. How do you use those? You're going to use zone expanders, polling loop zone expanders. Or you could use wireless devices from the 5800 series to use those remaining zones. The zone expanders are pretty cool because each one of these is going to give you eight additional hardwired zones to use with your system. So let's say you have your house and you have your 50P in your basement. And the 9 zones on the panel work good enough to monitor the house. Your front door, you got a couple of windows, garage door, some other stuff. But the panel is full up. Now you have another part of the house that you want to monitor and there's a bunch of zones there. The convenience of the zone expander is it's going to let you take this device and install it wherever you are in the house. Ideally if you can get it close to where the zones are going to be installed, that's the best place to put it. Then all I have to do is connect a wire from this guy back to your main panel. And then you connect your contacts in the room, or in the rooms of the house, or the location, to this device here. They're going to send all that information from this device to your main panel. As you can see, this is going to let you place the zone expanders around and get security on all the different locations that you'd like to install it on. The easier way to do this is really to put a wireless transceiver on your system. And then install wireless devices in the location. Sometimes though, the wireless option isn't the ideal solution for the situation and hardwired is the way to go. The polling loop zone expander is going to let you do that. So the 4208SN and the 4208U, what these devices do is they allow you to connect a wired contact or a normal wired device to a polling loop system. The polling loop itself isn't able to have devices directly attached to it. So you need one of these units to convert it so that it does work with the system. The difference between the 4208SN and the 4208U though is that the 4208SN works with polling loop systems. It has a serial number polling loop whereas the 4208U can work on all the polling loop systems that work with a DIP switch setup. On older polling loop panels, they require that a DIP switch device be used to interface wire devices to the system. So the 4208U is what you're going to have to use on those older polling loop systems. The newer systems work with serial numbers. So the 4208SN or the 4208U can be used with those systems. Lastly, on a 50P and on all polling loop devices, the polling loop has a certain amount of current that it has available on it. That is the reason why the 4208 and both of its versions allow for an outsized power source or an outside power source to be used with the device. This is because if you have a whole bunch of stuff on your polling loop, the power draw might be great and it could be getting close to the limit. And you may need to power these devices separately with a different power source so that you don't overdraw the polling loop itself. The one big difference too that you're going to find between two zone expanders that are out there. There's the 4208SN and the 4208U. The 4208SN only lets you program the device via serial number. The 4208U lets you program the device via serial numbers or via DIP switches. And again, this is something that you're going to notice if you dig in deeper into the insulation for either of these devices. If you do have any questions about installing a polling loop zone expander on your VISTA-50P, how to set these devices up, or really what benefits they're going to give you, feel free to give us a call at 888-818-7728. Send us an email to support@alarmgrid.com or check out our website, www.alarmgrid.com. Did like the video? Feel free to subscribe. And if you want to be notified when we post future videos, hit the notification button below and we'll send you an update when you do so. Thanks for watching and have a great day.