DSC powerseries, interleaving wired and wireless zones

Support
1

I have a problem with a DSC PowerSeries (PC1832) system which I haven’t seen described anywhere, and I’m wondering if others have dealt with this.

Short question: is it possible to use wireless zones in the range claimed by a PC5108 zone expander? I haven’t seen any documentation that says it’s not, but it’s causing me problems (see below).

Longer description:

This house had an existing wired alarm system but a few of the zones were not working (broken wiring) so I replaced those zones with wired sensors.

The PC1832 has 8 built-in zones, and can support a total of 32 zones either as wireless zones via an RF5132 or as wired zones with additional zone expanders (PC5108). I have one PC5108 jumpered to be zones 9-16. That leaves me with zones 1-8 as the builtin wired zones on the PC1832, zones 9-16 as additional wired zones via the PC5108, and zones 17-32 as wireless only.

In this configuration, all the wired zones (1-8 on the builtin circuit board and 9-16 on the PC5108) work fine, and all the wired zones 17-32 work fine. But the zones that used to be wired as 6 and 11 have broken wiring, and I replaced those with wired sensors. I set the wireless/AML zone attribute (option 8) for those zones. Zone 6 (which could have been a builtin wired zone but is now configured as a wireless zone) works fine. Zone 11 (which could have been a builtin wired zone but is now configured as a wireless zone) comes up as “zone fault” every time the panel exits installer mode; after that point, opening and closing the affected contact sensor will clear the zone fault (and the zone status is reported correctly), but entering/exiting installer mode brings back the zone fault again.

I tried a few things (deleted zone 11 and added it back, moved it to zone 15 which was unused, completely defaulted and redid the RF5132 programming, replaced the sensor used for zone 11) and none of that helped. Then I temporarily moved the zone 11 programming to zone 22 (outside the range used by the PC5108) and it worked fine. Meanwhile, zone 6 (also a wireless sensor overlapping the wired zones) works fine.

At this point the only difference I see is that zones 11 and 15 are overlapping the range used by the PC5108, and might be “claimed” by the PC5108 and cannot be used by wireless zones? I haven’t found any documentation to that effect, the panel will let me program it that way, DLS programming software lets me program it that way (and DLS generally has a bunch of warnings about programming errors, and it doesn’t consider this one). The zone status is even reflected correctly. But the recurring zone fault makes it a deal-breaker.

Has anyone seen or dealt with this, know how to fix it, or know for sure that it it doesn’t work and I need to renumber my zones to avoid this case (any wireless zones overlapping the range claimed by a PC5108)?

2

Then I temporarily moved the zone 11 programming to zone 22 (outside the range used by the PC5108) and it worked fine.

This is what I would do to resolve permanently. It’s very likely that the extender is causing this issue.

3

Thanks. I agree that’s the pragmatic solution.

It’s not quite as simple as that (move single zone to unused zone greater than 16) because I have multiple zones in this state (want to be wireless replacements for zones in the 9-16 range) and not enough free zones beyond 17. I can make this work, but will have to renumber multiple zones to do so (wired and wireless seem to coexist fine in the 1-8 range, but not the 9-16 range, so I have to move a few other wired zones from 1-8 to 9-16, to free up wired-or-wireless potential zones in the 1-8 range).

It’s not a huge amount of work, but I did want to ask first to see if there’s another easier way, something else I may have missed, and if not – maybe writing up this experience will be useful to someone else later.

Thanks for your quick reply!

4

I’ve not specifically dealt with this issue. Have you tried putting in a resistor across the unused zone terminals on the PC5108? Does the same issue occur?

5

Good idea. I didn’t try that.

  • didn’t think of it because this unit is configured with no EOL resistors. Whoever installed the sensors before me, had put them in the wrong place (wired directly in series with each sensor, back at the panel, which is useless as I understand it, so I removed them for simplicity)

  • I’ve already gone ahead and renumbered the zones (so my wireless zones are mostly on 17+ which doesn’t overlap with wired zones at all, or if I had to, using zones 1-8 which could be wired on the builtin board but work fine if I set the wireless bit, and definitely avoiding any wireless zones in the range of 9-16 that overlaps with the PC5108). The zones are reporting correctly and the faults have gone away.

So, it feels like I’ve maybe stumbled on an undocumented, unsupported corner case. Surprised I don’t see any other people who’ve run into this complaining about it, but who knows. My other DSC system is a PC1864+TR5164 and less constrained on zone numbers so I never tried this case there.

6

didn’t think of it because this unit is configured with no EOL resistors. Whoever installed the sensors before me, had put them in the wrong place (wired directly in series with each sensor, back at the panel, which is useless as I understand it, so I removed them for simplicity

Instead of a resistor then, it would just be a jumper wire. Just trying to close the wired circuit and see if it affects the fault reporting.

I’ve already gone ahead and renumbered the zones (so my wireless zones are mostly on 17+ which doesn’t overlap with wired zones at all, or if I had to, using zones 1-8 which could be wired on the builtin board but work fine if I set the wireless bit, and definitely avoiding any wireless zones in the range of 9-16 that overlaps with the PC5108). The zones are reporting correctly and the faults have gone away.

Based on what you report this is probably the best way to do it anyway, glad you were able to resolve.

7

Wireless sensors work fine with the onboard zones. But not so well occupying a zone reserved for and by a zone expander.
One of the problems is that the expander follows the attributes of the system, for instance, if you select EOL resistors on section [013], all the zones within the expansion module will follow that. If you have placed a wireless sensor there, and is NC, may have issues. Also, any changes in section [013] 1 and 2, need to power cycle for correct operation.
I am not sure what was the programming of this particular panel. I hope that helps.

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