Using the Chime feature on a Qolsys IQ Panel 2

Hi, DIYers. I'm Jorge from Alarm Grid. Today, we're going to be going over whether or not a Qolsys IQ Panel 2 chimes whenever a door is opened. The quick answer to that is yes. As long as you have the settings correctly configured, as long as you have chimes enabled, and you can even add voice descriptors as well to the IQ panel sensor that you have, the panel will chime. Now there's a couple of things we want to look at, such as the volume. We want to make sure whether or not the voice is enabled, the chime is enabled for the sensor, and also at the panel level. All right? So the first thing I want to get into is actually going ahead and checking the panel settings. And then we can go in and play around with the sensor settings. All right. So the first thing you're going to need to do is you're going to need to get your master code, your installer code, or your dealer code. Either one of these will work to adjust the sound settings in your system, which is what we need to do. The default master code is 1234. The default installer code is 1111. And the default dealer code is 2222. Now your codes may have been changed if you're currently being monitored, or if you yourself have changed them, your company or yourself could have possibly updated the codes to something else. So you want to make sure you're using the updated codes. My panel is defaulted, so I'm going to be using my default code. So I'm going to hit the little gray bar at the top that'll bring up my menu screen. And from the menu screen, I'm going to hit settings. After I go into settings, you're then going to go to advanced settings. Now once I'm in advanced settings, here's where you're going to need to enter in your master, installer code, or dealer code. I'm going to use my installer code just because I'm going to need it in a little bit to show you guys how you can play around with the voice descriptor or with this own description. That way your voice can actually-- you can add in custom ones, which I'll show you guys in a second. So I'm going to enter in my 1111. From here, the first thing I'm going to go to is sound. From sound, you're going to hit the very first option, volume. Now the volume, the voice's volume. So if you guys have a voice descriptor, you want to make sure that your voice's volume is set to whatever you want it to be. If it is set to 0, whenever you open up-- here I have my front door. Whenever I open up my front door, you will only hear the chime because I disabled the voice. If I enable the voice-- voice volume front door open-- you're going to hear front door open. So now you hear the voice for the sensor itself. Now you can also change the voice descriptions on the sensors, and I'll show you guys how to do that once I get past the actual panel settings for the sounds. But one thing that I want you guys to realize here, if you guys can hear-- front door open-- you see how the chime kind of is on top of the voice description, and it kind of drains out the actual-- the first half of the voice description. So maybe that's something that you might want to adjust, maybe you might not want enable chime for a sensor, you can always disable the chime for the sensor as well and just leave it voice description. You can also disable the setting-- the actual, at panel level, the beep's and chime's volume. So if I bring it down low here, now you should only hear the voice description. Front door open. And there's no chime. I'm going to leave my chime enabled for now, my chime enabled for now, and I'll show you guys how you can manually change a chime for the sensor itself. So again, if I set this off-- front door open-- front door open, I'm just going to hit close. The next thing you can do, if you have a whole bunch of sensors already programmed into your system and you want to play around with the different chimes that each sensor has, you can go to edit chimes. From here, you have all your sensors, and you see that my first one on my panel glass break and my chime is set to none. That's pretty normal. You can enable chimes in voice descriptions for any kind of sensors, whether they're front door, window sensors, motions, glass breaks, flood detectors, smoke sensors, seal-- whatever kind of sensor it is, you can enable chimes and voice descriptions for them. Now from here, front door, I can go in and hit edit. I can change my sound. I can put it to beep, and if I want to hear it, I can hit play. I can leave it as a doorbell from our front door. I'll just leave it like that at my front door. So now whenever I open my front door-- front door open. But you saw how that doorbell chime is very long, so it kind of just overpowers that voice description. So again, if you want to disable the chime, you can just go to that doorbell here and just hit none. I'm going to leave it as doorbell because I'm going to show you guys how to do it at the sensor level as well after we get out of the panel settings. So one other important thing here. Now after you play around with the first two settings, we didn't have a voice settings, and underneath there, we have chime settings. So the voice settings as well is something that you want to make sure is enabled. If you go to your sensors and your sensors on their voice settings is disabled, that means that your sensors will not have any voices. It'll just be the doorbell, or the chimes for the sensors. So you want to make sure your sensors are enabled on their voice settings because you want the voices to work for the sensors. The other option you want to look at is the chime settings. You want to make sure, if you're planning on using chimes on your sensors that you have the chime enabled for your sensor chimes. If I disable this, you will only hear the voice. Front door open. And again, this is a global setting. These are global settings that we're working with here. So that means any voices for any sensors or any chime for any sensors, if you disable them or enable them, it's going to turn that feature off. So, again, I would leave it enabled unless you're actually planning on disabling that for every single sensor in the panel. All right? Now from here, we're going to leave everything as is. We're going to hit the back arrow key, and I'm going to show you how to do it at the sensor level as well. I'm going to go to installation, devices, security sensors, and then from here, I'm going to go to edit sensor because I have an existing sensor. I'm going to hit the little pencil icon to edit. And then from here, you can hit chime type. You can set it to none and have it do-- front door open. Sorry, you have to hit save in order for it to actually work. Sensor updated successfully. You updated the sensors successfully. Now if I open it-- front door open-- you only hear the voice. I'm going to go back to edit, and I'm actually going to show you guys a custom description. So custom descriptions are basically words that are not in the vocabulary of a system. Normal words are usually like front door, kitchen, living room, door, window, motions, smoke, bedroom, master, , guest bunch of different predefined words that are usually going into systems. The cool thing with the IQ 2 Plus, though, is that it actually has a chip that allows it to read whatever you type in there. So you can literally type any word in your custom description. And as long as the chip can read it out, it will actually voice to script it out. So for instance, here's a word that probably won't even be-- you guys, for sure, will know is not in the description, YouTube. I'll type in YouTube sensor. Check. Now from there, I'm going to leave my chime disabled so you guys can actually hear the voice enunciation. And let's go ahead and hit save. Sensor updated successfully. Now if I open my sensor up, it will say YouTube sensor open. YouTube sensor open. So it has full custom description capability. You guys can play around with it. You guys can add in your own custom descriptions if you don't see anything in the predefined ones. But yes, that's pretty neat. So, again, we'll just go back in here real quick. I'm going to enable the chime, save-- sensor updated successfully-- you can hit the house button to the back out all the way to the main screen. And last chime here-- YouTube sensor open. Yes. So there's different chimes. You can play with different voice descriptions. There's the panel settings that you can-- which is like the global settings, I would call them, and then there's at the sensor level settings that you can change as well. So there's a couple of ways that you can play around with the chime settings and even the voice settings for a sensor. And if you guys have any more questions on what you can do, feel free to contact us at support@alarmgrid.com. If you find the video helpful, make sure you hit Like underneath. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and hit the little bell icon, so whenever we upload new content, you guys get notified. I'm Jorge, and I'll see you guys next time.