House + Barn = One Total System

I am currently a Vivint customer and have their 2Gig panel. I have the following for the House: 5 door sensors, 1 smoke, 7 glass breaks (ranch house). Then for the barn I have one door sensor. Here is my issue…the farthest point on my barn is roughly 300 ft away from the control panel. There was a repeater put in my garage about 25’ from the panel to help amplify the signal to the barn. I have no issue with the door sensor working on the barn since it’s an exterior door. My issue was that I had 2 motion sensors in the barn. One in the middle and one located on the far back wall (farthest point). With the repeater it would pick up the door sensor and the closest motion sensor but not the farthest one. What are my options? Do I hard wire the 2 motion sensors to at least into the garage and then install the converter (to take from a wired sensor to wireless…forget tech. term)? I know the 2gig panel has 2 hardwired connections…will both sensors take both hardwired connections or just one? I also want to hard wire an exterior siren model AMSECO SSX-52S. Can I do both the motion sensors and the exterior siren? Or is my only other option to do a separate system? I really don’t want to because then I will have another monitoring fee. Is there away to put another control panel in the barn and still have the one in the house under one account?

This is going to be a difficult set up no matter how you do it. Did the Vivint technician decide to install wireless 2GIG sensors in a barn 300ft from your house and put a repeater in your garage or did you do that yourself? Is your barn heated and air conditioned? Is it made of metal or wood?

You can use a wired siren and the 2 wired sensor inputs on the panel at the same time.

The Vivint tech. installed two motion sensors in the barn (see attachment for interior view) and the repeater in the garage. See link for exterior view http://screencast.com/t/5cEAvgN8W. The barn is heated…when it gets below 50 the thermostat kicks on. The barn is enclosed in metal and the house is a brick ranch.

My other option is to get a system thru Fortress and monitor it thru a cellular connection using a SIM Card. However, I would like to keep thru one system.

If the Vivint tech did this and you’re still a Vivint customer then I suggest you call Vivint and have them come out and fix the problem for free. If you try to fix it yourself then you might void their warranty. They caused the problem in the first place.

Wireless sensor signals won’t go through the metal walls so putting any wireless sensors inside a metal barn is a bad idea. The fact that the door and the one motion detector are working at all is probably just because some signal is escaping through a window or a non-metal door. The signals don’t go through brick very well either because it contains metal.

Any solution to this problem is going to involve using wired sensors. You might run wires all the way back to the house or you might put wired sensors in the barn and run them to a wireless transmitter outside the barn or in the window that can reach the house. Either way, you paid for a professional design and installation and got something that doesn’t work so make the guy who sold it to you fix it.

you paid for a professional design and installation and got something that doesn't work so make the guy who sold it to you fix it.

LOL. When it comes to Vivint, trying to get them to fix an installation issue, or defective equipment is like trying to get a low rate interest loan from Western Sky. (Western Sky charges 355%)

(Sorry, couldn’t resist…)