DSC Alarm Keypad Beeping And Yellow Triangle? Trouble Menu Navigation On A DSC NEO Alarm System

Hey guys, Hayden here again from alarm systems store. And today we're going to be focusing on troubleshooting on the DSC alarm systems. So this is a DSC Neo, but this will cover additional DSC systems as well. They all use a very similar trouble menu to give you indication as to what is wrong with your system. So as many of you with DSC systems know, occasionally you will see this yellow triangle come up. This keypad will also beep excessively, and that just means that you have a trouble condition. So in theory, that's why you're here watching this video. But I do want to warn you, this video is not going to cover any particular troubles. Specifically, this video is an intro video on the trouble menu. And what we are going to do is provide short videos for every trouble that we can create on this system. So hopefully by the end of this little series, we will have a video for every trouble condition and what steps you can take to try to fix it. So let's just go ahead and jump in to what we got going on here.

First off, this troubleshooting guide up here under the troubleshooting, it says how to get into the trouble menu and how to navigate it. It's not super explanatory, which is why I'm going to demonstrate it on the keypad here in a minute. But below that, it gives all of the troubles you will see on the alarm system. Now, I will say this guide was made a little while ago when the system first came out, and this is for the Neo, like I mentioned. But some of the terms may have changed, some of the wording, so it may not look exactly like this, but just go check our video and it will give you whatever the most up to date listing for that trouble is on subsequent pages of this little manual. It does give you troubleshooting steps for each type of trouble. I will tell you that a lot of these are very short descriptions and they may not mean a whole lot to you if you're not familiar with the system. So it can be helpful, but it can also just get you nowhere if you don't know what you're reading. So that's why we're doing this little mini-series of troubles.

Hopefully we can give a general cover off for all troubles and what to do to fix them. So first off, I'm just going to jump into the keypad and we're going to learn how to navigate the trouble menu. So if you have a trouble condition on your system, you will always see this screen pop up, won't stay up constantly, but it will scroll like it was just a moment ago and you will see this. So what it's telling you is that there is a system trouble. And if you want to view it, to hit star two. Now, when you hit star two, and this is where most people get confused, it doesn't go directly to the trouble itself. It gives you menu options or section options for the different trouble sections. So this very first one is service required. Now if we use the arrow key from here, we can scroll through additional trouble sections. So this one is battery trouble, device faults, module tampers, communications, and then press pound to exit. Anytime you see the press pound to exit, what that means is you've reached the end of that menu layer.

So what we can do is just go back to our service required. That is our first section of troubles. So from here, you can see on the screen there where it says press star for service required. So if we hit star, it takes us into the service required menu. Now you can read through the individual troubles. First one I have on this system is bell circuit, and loss of clock as well, and then press pound to exit. So under the service required menu, there are two troubles right now. So if we hit pound, it takes you back one page. The pound doesn't just take you back to the main menu. On a DSC, if you're unfamiliar, star is basically the enter button. Pound is basically the back button. So we went back one step. Now we're still in the trouble menu. We're just at the section title part of it, the very first layer.

And perfect example of another thing that people run into when trying to check troubles. The trouble menu is a timed menu. So since we just let it sit there without pressing anything, it actually went back to the regular scrolling through the menu screen so that you can see what zones are open, see your system status, blah, blah, blah. So if I want to go back into trouble menu, hit star two. And now we're going to go over and look at battery trouble. If you hit star on, there says no battery system area. Now, as you can probably guess, I just don't have a battery hooked up to this system. And that's what I use to cause this trouble so that you guys could see it. So if I hooked a battery up, that would fix this problem. There may be additional battery troubles that come up after you attach it, like a low battery, for example. And in those cases, you just got to let it charge and then eventually it will clear. I got to quit letting a timeout.

But if we keep going, we have device faults, this is just another section. It tells you that there is device fault on a zone. So if we hit star again while we're in device faults, it will tell us the actual zone that has the fault. So I have a smoke detector hooked up without a resistor and that's a big no no. So the system is telling me there's a fire trouble and that my wiring is incorrect on my smoke detectors. So if we go back from there, we can scroll back through, we can go to module tampers or the communications section. I'm not going to go into every single one of them, just read the troubles. Basically I just caused a lot of troubles on this system so I could explain how the menu works.

So now that I've done that, I want to talk a little bit about what steps you can take on your own if we don't have your specific trouble outlined just yet on our page. But this manual right here on my right is basically just a section of the neo reference manual. And all alarm system manuals should have one like this basically just lists out all the trouble sections and then each individual trouble for that section. And essentially you just match up your trouble. The wording might be a little bit off, as you can see there that says module low battery and what we saw was battery trouble, but you can kind of put two and two together to figure out what it's trying to talk about.

So if we don't have your guide up specifically, go to this section of the manual and on the subsequent pages it will list out what each individual trouble is trying to tell you. And right here it kind of gives a brief description of what each one is. So there's panel low battery, there's certain module low batteries. So power supplies require a battery as well. And if those batteries start going low, it will tell you that it is one of those power supply batteries. So needless to say, there are a lot of troubles that can show up. Most of them you won't ever see, but we're going to try and cover them all anyway. And that way if you do, there will be a guide for it. So keep an eye out for that. And if you guys enjoyed the video, please like and subscribe. I think that's plenty long enough to explain the trouble menu, so I will catch you guys on the next one.