Low Device Battery Trouble Wont Clear? DSC PowerSeries NEO Trouble Conditions

Hey guys. Hayden here again from alarm system store. And today we're going to be talking about low battery troubles that get stuck on the DSC neo system. This has happened with every alarm system I've ever worked with, but recently because the neo is becoming the most popular DSC system, this is what I'm hearing about it on most. So the reason this can happen is because whenever you have multiple trouble conditions being sent from your wireless devices to the transceiver or the system, sometimes those signals come in too quick. Either one, the keypad with the transceiver in it, or the system itself doesn't recognize one of the signals or the sensor itself doesn't get prompted to send that signal back to the panel.

So essentially what happens is whenever your devices show a low battery, they send a signal from the sensor to the receiver that says, hey, I have a low battery I need changed. And that works exactly as it's supposed to. But anytime you open a sensor, it throws a tamper condition. So anytime you open that sensor, it's also sending another signal. And then when you take the battery out, sometimes if you do that too quickly, it can basically cause either the system to not recognize that you've put a new battery in or that the tamper has been cleared. Whatever the case might be, one of those troubles gets stuck.

Now, unfortunately, it is difficult to create that scenario so that I can show you guys because it is very rare, but I've run into a few customers over the last few weeks that have had a bunch of batteries start wearing out. They went through and replaced them all and unfortunately they just did it too quick. And either the sensor got stuck thinking that it still had a trouble, or the system did not clear the trouble because it didn't receive the proper signal from the sensor. So basically, I'm just going to be going over what to do. If you have a low battery, you swap it out and then the low battery trouble stays on the system.

So there's a couple of different ways to go about this. The easiest is just to power cycle the panel. Nine times out of ten. That works. Basically anytime it's a system issue where the system didn't receive the signal, power cycling will fix it. If for some reason the sensor, however, did not get prompted to either send that signal or one of the signals to like a confirmation signal from the panel got blocked or something, sometimes the sensor itself can still show that trouble. So there's two different procedures there. You always want to start off with power cycle and then basically delete and re enroll the sensor, if it is the sensor with the issue. So here in a second, I'm going to change the camera over. I'm going to show you guys how to power cycle, and I'm going to show you how to delete and re enroll a wireless sensor on the neopanel.

If for whatever reason, you don't know how to trigger your sensor to re enroll on the panel. All power g devices are different. This one has a button you hold because it's a motion. Door contacts and smokes, they all have their own specific triggers. So if you need help with that, you can check out our site, grab the manual for the sensor that you're working on, and in that manual, it will tell you step by step how to enroll that device. So I'll be right back.

All right, so as you guys can see, I got a pretty simple little set up here. Basically just got a keypad, the mainboard, battery, transformer, and our wireless device. So you guys are going to have to pretend a little bit here with me because I don't have any batteries that are low enough to show a low battery. They're either all dead or they're still showing good. So we're just going to have to pretend that these troubles exist. And I'm going to show you the process on what to do if you run into this issue where the trouble gets stuck. A lot of times this trouble happens because you have multiple sensors that have low batteries at once. Or if you swap the batteries in the sensors too quickly, sometimes the trouble will get stuck as well.

Basically, if you swap the batteries too quickly, the sensor itself doesn't have time to send the signals to the panel quickly enough so that it can pick everything up that's happened. So let's say you had a low battery or multiple low batteries. You go through, change the battery, the sensor's got the led lighting up showing that it's good to go and everything seems all right. But you still have that trouble for a low battery on zone one. In this case, if that happens, the first thing I recommend doing is rebooting your system. And to do that, the easiest way is just to disconnect the battery and then disconnect the transformer. So on the battery, you can just remove this red wire from the battery over here, or you can just do this, which is what I prefer to do on DSC systems.

They got a little quick connect for the battery cable, so you can just pull that straight off and then come over to the transformer. If you can access it and just unplug it. In my case, I'm going to be just using the switch here, powering it down so powers down the system. If you want to make sure that your system is off, go to the keypad. It will be completely blank like this. Now, whenever you go to reboot, you only have to give it 15, 20 seconds or so. It doesn't have to be very long, but plug the battery back in and then reconnect the transformer.

After a few seconds the system will power back up and it will run through and check if there are any new trebles on the system. One thing to keep in mind is anytime that you power cycle or reboot your system on a DSC, you will always get a loss of clock trouble. Unless you have alarm.com service. Alarm.com service will automatically set the time and date for your panel. Just give it a few minutes, it'll set it all up for you. Not a big deal. But if you don't have alarm.com, you can hit star two and then if you see the service required, hit star and then you should see loss of clock with a star next to it. So hit star, enter your master code and then reenter the time and date.

So now that that is done, I pressed one a little bit too much. But once that's done, all the troubles on your system should be clear. Now what the system is going to do is it's going to reconnect to all your sensors, it's going to reconnect to any devices that you have on the system and it's going to check to see if there are any new trouble codes. So we don't have any new ones except for that loss of clock. So technically in this scenario we are good to go. And this is how it goes 99% of the time. Now, occasionally, if somehow the sensor itself got stuck on that low battery trouble, like I said, this can just happen because the signals aren't getting passed back and forth between the system and the sensor fast enough. But if the sensor is actually stuck in a low battery state, then it will continue to show after a power cycle. If that happens, the only recourse is to unenroll the sensor and re enroll it. So I'm going to run you guys through that process really quick and show you how to do it.

So if that is the case, go into your programming by hitting *8 followed by your installer code. The default is 5555. Go to section 804. And when you see select enroll device, start using the left arrow key to scroll left. We need to go to section 901. So 901, delete zones, hit * on that. Select the zone that is showing the trouble for us. It is zone one, hit *. It's going to bring up the id so you can double check. The id should always be on a sticker on the device, but it is 123-2659 so we're going to hit * again. Now that sensor has been deleted from the system.

So to re enroll it, hit # two times to get back to where it says 804 wireless programming. Hit * one time. It should say select enroll device. Hit * again. And at this point it will say enroll now or enter id. And this is where you can actually enroll the sensor. So for all PowerG  or wireless devices, period, there are different ways to trigger the enrollment. So with this one, what you have to do, because it's a motion, there's a little prong inside here next to the battery. You have to hold that down until you see the yellow led on the front of the sensor light up and then you let go of the button. So I'm going to try and do that where you guys can see it, but just take a screwdriver or whatever you have, hold that button down maybe until you see the yellow led light up and then let go. It's going to re enroll the sensor.

Now, if you have like a door contact or smoke or some other type of sensor, check the manual for that specific device and it will tell you how to enroll the device. There are different triggers for different types of devices, so put it back together and it's going to say confirm id on the keypad. Whenever it picks it up, you hit * here, and then it's going to ask you to enter the zone number that you want to enroll this device on. This was on zone one, so I'm going to type in one. It's going to ask for a zone definition. This will stay the same. So if you enroll it on the same zone, you don't have to mess with the zone definition. It's already set. So just hit * again. It's going to ask you to select a partition. Nine times out of ten, every system is just on partition one. So you can just hit pound. Hit pound. It's going to ask you to name the zone. Now, if you have a zone label plugged in here, it will show up with whatever your zone label is. So I'm not going to name it, it's just zone one. That's good enough for me. So hit pound. Now, you are done re enrolling the device. At this point, you can just hit pound, pound, pound, pound, back all the way out.

Now, as you can see, at least for me, I got system ready to arm, so everything's good to go on the system again. It cleared the troubles, and for you, it should also clear any stuck low battery troubles. So there is one other option. If for whatever reason you enroll it and it doesn't work after that, it's still showing the low battery, it means the sensor is still stuck in that low battery state. So what I recommend doing is deleting the sensor again, taking the battery out of the sensor for 1 minute and then putting it back in and then re enrolling the device again.

Now you can do that by default whenever you just delete and re enroll the sensor. Removing the battery out of a device for at least a minute just ensures that all of the power in the device flows out of it and it completely dies. Anytime an electronic device, whether it's wireless, the alarm system, whatever, anytime there is zero power running through it, it will start in its completely fresh state. So that's really all there is to it. Hope this helps you out there that are having trouble. If you don't mind, like and subscribe and I will catch you guys on the next one.