Hi,

I'm in the market for an alarm for a domestic house.

I need:

20 wired zones (achieved by add on zone expanders if necessary) to use
EOL wiring (I don't want wireless and I have a lot of rooms plus a
garage and server room/headend to protect.)

Must support 3 wired keypads (front door, back door and Landing)

Onboard POTS PSTN modem

Support for connection to smoke detectors, heat detectors and CO
detectors via a change over relay contacts.

ability to add an ethernet module (so I can log into alarm remotely via
boradband from anywhere)

Ability to add GSM/GPRS (to send text messages to my mobile phone & and
secondary comms back up should POTS PSTN or Ethernet go down).

I've been looking at the Honeywell G2-20 and Honeywell Galaxy Flex FX020.

The Galaxy Flex seems overkill with DCM support (door control module)
and ARC support and a gazillion programming options relating to the SIA.

The G2-20 seems like a good solution so far.

Any comment on using the G2-20 or galaxy flex in a domestic environment
or can anyone else suggest other alternative alarm panels?

Regards

Stephen.

In article ,
Stephen H writes:
Hi,

I'm in the market for an alarm for a domestic house.

I need:

20 wired zones (achieved by add on zone expanders if necessary) to use
EOL wiring (I don't want wireless and I have a lot of rooms plus a
garage and server room/headend to protect.)

Must support 3 wired keypads (front door, back door and Landing)

Onboard POTS PSTN modem

Support for connection to smoke detectors, heat detectors and CO
detectors via a change over relay contacts.

ability to add an ethernet module (so I can log into alarm remotely via
boradband from anywhere)

Ability to add GSM/GPRS (to send text messages to my mobile phone & and
secondary comms back up should POTS PSTN or Ethernet go down).

I've been looking at the Honeywell G2-20 and Honeywell Galaxy Flex FX020.

The Galaxy Flex seems overkill with DCM support (door control module)
and ARC support and a gazillion programming options relating to the SIA.

The G2-20 seems like a good solution so far.

Any comment on using the G2-20 or galaxy flex in a domestic environment
or can anyone else suggest other alternative alarm panels?

Cytech Comfort does all this. Mine are 12 years old now and did
8-64 inputs/zones (individually configurable for NO, NC, dual EOL
or not, etc) and 8-64 outputs. Biggest configuration in a single
panel system was 24 inputs/zones and 8 outputs, but you can have
up to 4 panels spread around larger premises for more local
connections of 16 zones/inputs and 16 outputs each, and the panels
are linked with a single (twisted) pair bus and ground connection.
It supports up to 8 keypads, and any house phone can also be used
as a keypad (although you probably wouldn't want to use a phone
for the main entry/exit keypads and you must have one real keypad).
Keypads can be used as intercoms and baby monitors and there's a
built-in answerphone with multiple mailboxes, but I've never used
any of this.

I'm not up to date with sizing of their current models, but I
know they can now go much bigger than this with zone expanders,
which mine doesn't support, and they may also have some
cheaper less expandable systems.

Ethernet and RS232 access is available. These are a raw API
interface and don't provide higher level features such as web
access, but I think they now provide PC software which does
that. I wrote my own a long time ago though. Their APIs are all
documented, specifically so you can build your own software and
hardware interfaces (I've done both).

It's not cheap though, and probably only worthwhile if you are
intending to use its extensive programmable home automation
features too, although it is primarily an alarm. It supports
DCM and ARC, but you simply ignore these parts of the
configuration if you don't use them.

However, you will have to learn how to program it at some level
to configure the zones to do what you want. I'm used to
programming it raw from the keypads and have written some of
my own tools to interface to it, but I think nowadays, most
customers who do their own configuration and professional
installers use Cytech's Windows application to interface to
program it, which probably makes things much easier.

--
Andrew Gabriel
[email address is not usable -- followup in the newsgroup]