Using the Qolsys IQ Siren with a Honeywell Lyric Alarm

[DIGITAL EFFECT] Hey, DIYers, I'm George from Alarm Grid. Today I'm going to be going over how to add this IQ Qolsys IQ Z-Wave Siren to the Lyric Alarm System. Now this is a Z-Wave Siren, which means technically, it should work with Lyric System, and I'm going to show you guys how to include this and add it into the system so that it actually sounds off whenever an alarm goes off.

Now again, this is only going to sound whenever an alarm is going off. So whether it's a burglary or a fire alarm, it's pretty much where you're going to be able to set it to. So the first thing we want to do, is we want to go ahead and exclude it. What that's going to do, is going to wipe any memory that this system, that this Siren may have tied to another system. So we're going to want to exclude it first. That goes for any Z-Wave device that you guys ever learn into a system. Always exclude, and then you include. All right?

So to do that on the Lyric system, I'm at the home screen. I'm going to hit the automation button. From automation, I'm going to hit the down arrow, and then I'm going to go to Tools. And Tools, you're going to see exclude devices. It's going to say enter inclusion exclusion mode. And then now it says ready to exclude. I'm just going to hit this little button at the very top of the Siren. The light flashes. Unknown device excluded. This is the only device that I've pressed. So that's the device that was excluded.

Now one weird thing about this Siren is, remember when I said it technically should work. It does work, except when it learns in, it learns in as a switch. So it's just something for you guys to keep in mind when you guys are learning this in. There's not a Z-Wave category. Or, I'm sorry. There's not a Siren category in the Z-Wave option screen on this. So it will learn it as a switch. So you're just going to go in there and then rename it to IQ2 Siren.

So now that we excluded it, I'm going to include, and you guys are going to see, that it comes in as a switch. I press the button one more time. The light flashes once. And then the-

[BEEPS]

Screen says device found. I'm going to only include just one, so I hit done. And you're going to see one here. Secured one switch. See one switch. It's seeing this other switch. So now I'm just going to hit the back arrow key twice. And it learned in in my switch category. So you see here what I said, that there is no Sirens, Siren categories. It's just switches, thermostats, locks, garages, water valves.

So I have to go to my switches.

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And my switch one, I'm going to highlight it, I'm going to hit Edit. And I'm going to name it IQ2 Siren.

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Because that's what it is. So I'm going to go ahead and spell it out. C I Q space.

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And again, you can name it whatever you like. If you're putting this in a hallway, Siren. You can put it living room Siren, bedroom one Siren, whatever you guys want to label it as. I'm just going to label it as my IQ Siren. So I hit Save.

[BEEPS]

And now we can back out all the way to the home screen. Now to make this work with the Lyric system, you do need to make scenes. Now this Lyric system is tied in with the Total Connect 2.0 account. Total Connect 2.0 is an application and a website where you can control the system remotely. So you can arm, disarm, you can control Z-Wave devices, create email and text messaging notifications on any alarms.

So if you do have a Lyric with Total Connect account with the Total, yeah, a Lyric that's tied to a Total Connect 2.0 account, you will need to make the scenes through Total Connect. If you have a Lyric that's just not tied to any monitoring service or not tied to a Total Connect account, you can actually create the scenes from the automation screen. Today I'm going to demonstrate how to do it from the Total Connect All right?

So I'm going to go ahead and grab my iPad real quick. I'm going to go ahead and plug this into the wall, by the way. So cool thing about this IQ2 Siren is that it plugs into a wall, it has a built-in backup battery. So if the Siren does end up going off, and somebody just unplugs the Siren, it still keeps on sounding. It has a backup battery in there. The only way to make this Siren stop sounding is to toggle it off on the panel. Or we're going to create a scene that whenever we disarm the system, it also turns the Siren off.

All right, so now that I have my IQ2 Siren plugged into one of the wall outlets, I'm not going to go ahead and go to my tablet. All right, now that I have my tablet all set up and ready to go, I'm going to go ahead and go to my Total Connect app. Make sure you guys do have the correct app downloaded. It'll be a red with the white letters that say TC. If you're looking it up in the app store, it's Total Connect 2.0.

Keep in mind, in order to use Total Connect 2.0, you do need a monitoring company to enable it for you. The app is free, but the account needs to be created by a monitoring company. And I'm going to go in and log into mine. It actually probably is automatically logged in already. Yep, you'll see office Lyric, has my password already there. It remembers me. And it brings me to the home screen of the Lyric system, which right now it's showing disarmed, disarmed.

And just to make sure that my Siren has pushed over to the app, I'm going to go down to the bottom navigation bar and hit automation. And there you go. Now since I just learned the Siren in, it is going to bring up the screen. It says you have one or more new devices added to your system. Select a representative icon for each of the devices. I only have the Siren, so I'm going to hit the Siren. And since there's no Siren icons, I'm just going to leave it as a switch for now. And I'm going to hit continue, and done.

All right. So right now, it's obviously showing that my Siren is off. I can toggle it on if I want to. It's going to take a-

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For the command to be sent The Siren goes off when I toggle it on.

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And I can turn it off.

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Cool. So the Siren was toggled off from the app. So remember, whenever you're sending commands through the app, keep in mind, it does have to go to the alarm net servers, then down to the panel, and then to the Z-Wave device. So it's sometimes it does take a little bit. If you guys have slow connection to your Wi-Fi, if you guys have, you guys are using your phone and you guys have a bad cellular reception as well, it could take a while for the commands to be sent. So it's just something to keep in mind when you're using the app.

So that shows you right there that the Siren is working with the automation. Now what we have to do, is create scenes. The scenes is what we're going to use to make the Siren go off whenever there's a fire alarm or a burglar alarm. And then in order to, I'm sorry, we're going to make the scene to turn the Siren on when there's a fire a burglar alarm, and then we're going to make a scene to turn the Siren off whenever you disarm the system.

So I went over to my scene icon over there in the navigation bar at the bottom of the app. And on the top right, you should see a plus sign. I'm going to hit that plus sign. And I'm going to start off naming my, the first scene I'm going to name it fire alarm. All right. And I'm going to hit Save.

Now the device that we want to use is going to be the Qolsys Siren. So we're going to toggle that. And we want the Siren to turn on whenever there's a fire alarm. So you hit continue. Now the trigger is what's going to cause the Siren to turn on. So you want this based on another device. And the device that it's going to be, is going to be the actual security system.

We're going to have the system, and basically, whenever the alarm system goes into a fire alarm, it will make the Siren turn on. And as you can see there, that's a summary screen. The trigger is when your security system is in a fire alarm and then the Siren turns on. You're just going to hit Save. And it's going to say loading smart scenes.

Now keep in mind, we do want to give it a little bit of time for the scene to be sent down to the Lyric system, just to make sure it works properly. So now that we have the fire alarm created, we're going to create another one now, because I'm going to show you guys how to test it. And I'm going to do, I'm going to name this one IQ2 Siren off or Siren off. Siren off, save.

The device that we want to use again, is going to be the IQ2 Siren. We're going to leave it set to the off position, because that's what we want the Siren to do. And then the trigger again, is going to be based on another device, and we're going to select security system. And we're going to do the system disarms. Hit continue. So now our trigger is when your security system is disarmed, the Siren goes into the off position. You hit Save. And it's loading the smart scenes.

All right, now, like I said, usually you want to give it a little bit of time for the scenes to be sent down from the app to the servers to the Honeywell panel. All right? Now that that's all said and done, the scenes should be added to the Lyric system. We can easily test it right now by setting off a fire panic, which will turn the system into a fire alarm, which should cause the Siren to go off as well.

So give me just one moment. I'm going to show you guys how to do that. And let me go to the home screen on the app. OK, so now on the system, I'm just going to set off a quick fire alarm. And hopefully, the command from Total Connect has been pushed down to the system by now. And if that's the case, when we set off the fire alarm, the IQ2 Siren will also go off. So I'm going to hold the red exclamation point down for two seconds. And I'm going to set fire.

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The Siren is going off, which is perfect. Now if we disarm, it's a turn the Siren off.

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[INAUDIBLE]

Hmm. Give me a second.

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Armed away. Exit now.

OK, so that's actually a small little caveat there. So the Siren worked whenever the fire alarm went off, which is perfect. And however, what happened is, remember the scene we made, is whenever the system goes into a disarm state. What happened right now, the system was already in a disarm state, and all we did was set off fire panic. So the system was never actually able to be disarmed, it was just able to be cleared of the fire trouble.

Let me go ahead and go into my automation, or into my scenes real quick and see if I can edit that scene and the trigger to make it. Yeah, see, the only trigger is disarm. So in that case, what I had to do there, I had to arm the system so that I could then disarm it, so that it would actually give me an actual disarm. Which is why you saw now, when I actually disarmed that system, the Siren turned off.

In your case, whenever you guys create a scene for the burglar alarm to go off, the burglar alarm goes off when the system is armed. So whenever you disarm the system, the IQ2 Siren should also go off. If you guys run into the same issue that I did, another thing that you guys could easily do, is just go to this automation screen, switches, and you can easily just turn on and off the Siren from here.

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Turn it on. Turn it off. So you guys can easily control that from the automation screen. You guys can control it from the app as well. So that is a small little caveat. Again, it only did that because I did the panic while the system was in a disarmed mode. If it was armed and if I would have disarmed it, just like the trigger says, whenever the system disarms, it would have turned the IQ2 Siren off.

All right, that is just a quick brief video on how to add the IQ2 Siren and make it work with the Lyric system. You saw there's a couple of little caveats there, so you want to make sure that you guys do pay attention to those when you're setting up your Siren. If you guys have any questions at all whatsoever, give us, email us at support@alarmgrid.com. If you find the video helpful, make sure you hit Like underneath, subscribe to the YouTube channel, and enable the notifications, so whenever we upload new content, you guys do get notified. I"m George, and I'll see you guys next time.