Qolsys IQ 4 NS Local Alarm system Setup
Hey, guys, Hayden here again from Alarm System Store. And today we're going to be working on is the closest IQ4NS local setup. So if you're unfamiliar with the system we have a couple other videos on it. But this is the IQ4NS. It is an IQ 4 panel or IQ panel 4 from Qolsys. It just has no screen. And that's what the NS for. So basically there is no way to physically arm and disarm and interact with the system. there's a little button you can press for, trouble conditions and things like that. But otherwise it is designed to be used through apps. So the programing is done with an app. the user side of it is designed to be used with the alarm.com app. But there are ways to set this up as a local system by using keypads. So that's what we're going to do today. I'm going to show you how to enroll these two keypads. And then I'm going to show you what functionality they offer. Whenever you set it up this way. Now, the two keypads that work with this system are going to be mainly the IQ remote power, which is this one here. As you can see, it's very similar to an IQ 4, the speaker is a bit different, but the touchscreen is a seven inch touchscreen, just like the regular IQ panel 4 would have on it. And that is going to be, your primary secondary keypad. the second option that you have, if you are using the power G model of the IQ4NS, is going to be the DSC Neos, standard wireless keypad. Now, these are just straight power G. So the only way this keypad can connect to is if you have the wireless card for the power G in your IQ4NS. So this one, as you can see it's a bit more dumbed down. It's just a button style keypad. so really this is only going to be used for arming and disarming. There are some commands that you can do with it to like check troubles and things like that. But generally that stuff's going to be easier on the IQ remote. So if you plan to do this, I definitely recommend using the IQ remote. But this, DSC neo keypad is cheaper. So if you're just looking for, the cheapest way to make an IQ for in a local system, this would be the choice. That being said, I'm going to get the table set up so that I can show you guys how to enroll these two keypads and what functionality they offer. So I will be right back.
All right. So I have everything ready to start programing these keypads in. And I've got the IQ4NS here IQ remote power G DSC neo keypad. So the very first thing that we need to do is get into the installer programing app, which is called IQ installer. And that's this app right here. You'll see it up on the screen there, but basically when you open up this app, you need to use the installer code to be able to change the programing for the system. And if you use your master code, it will only allow you to change master user functions, which is not very in-depth. So, if for whatever reason you haven't seen the programing video for the IQ4NS I'll link that down below. Go check it out. That covers everything about this app and how it pairs to the system and how you use it and things like that. But basically today I'm going to be just showing how to pair keypads. So once you're in the app and you got it all logged in, if you have programed it before, you will be taken to the status page. If you have not, you will get the installer wizard and that is covered in that other video. So we're not going to go over that today. But if you come over here to configuration and you click on installer or installation and then click on devices and then security centers, we are going to add a security sensor because this keypad, the DSC neo keypad actually pairs as a security sensor because it uses power G only. So I'm going to click the plus down here at the bottom. And we're going to click on Auto Learn. So once you click start Auto Learn down here at the bottom it's going to put the system into auto learn mode. Once it is sitting there with the little spinning icon, what you can do is come over to the keypad. And as you can see there, it says press or hold one and star to enroll. So that's what we're going to do. Hold one and star says waiting for confirmation. All right. So whenever you do that and as soon as the panel receives the signal from this keypad, you'll see over here it says sensor confirmation. So we're going to click add double Check and make sure your ID number matches what's on here. but I do know that that's what it is.
So basically it's going to bring you to this page where it says security device's keypad to. So we're going to click on that. Oh, and the reason it says keypad two is because technically the IQ4NS counts as keypad one. But even though it's not a keypad so might be slightly confusing, but just know that this is keypad two, keypad three, so on and so forth. So once you click on that, you do have to configure it. The way you configure it is by giving it a name, choosing what sensor group it is going to be used under. if you want the voice prompts on, that actually does not apply to this particular keypad because this one does not have the voice functionality. there was a DSC neo keypad that did, but I believe that has been discontinued. So I don't know if they're going to make it again or not. But anyway, the voice prompts will only come from the IQ4NS if you are using this keypad so you can turn on or off the backlight, you can turn on or off the tamper. I always recommend having the tamper home on the tamper is just this back cover that it mounts to on the wall, so if this is pulled off then you will get a notification about it or the system will announce it anyway, you won't get notified because you're not using that. But anyway, once you've done those things and you've chosen what you want to choose, you can click save here, update it successfully, it will tell you that it's been updated successfully. And then we can stop the auto on on security devices. This keypad here is now enrolled. So if we hit, Star pound or something, you can see it comes up and it says system is ready to arm, but there are open zones so we can look through those if we want and scroll through. we'll go over more features here in a minute. But once you see system is ready to arm or system not ready, whatever, that means it is enrolled. So on the AMP we're going to go back a couple pages. We're going to go back to this screen where we see security sensors, Wi-Fi, Z-Wave devices, etc.. So this is where you get to actually decide how you want your IQ remote to be paired to your panel.
The IQ remote PG, power G, is a keypad that uses both the power G radio and a Wi-Fi radio at the same time, so you can have both of those paired, or you can just use one or the other. Generally, I recommend the power G connection because that is not only more secure than Wi-Fi, but it also has much better range as well as, encryption and frequency hopping on it. So I always recommend using the power G connection for these IQ remotes. But if for some reason you have to use Wi-Fi, by all means do so. It is capable of that. You can also just pair both, like I said, if you want. but what we're going to do is we're going to use the power G remote, the power G radio. So we're going to go back into security centers. We're going to click Add and Auto Learn again. And then over here we are going to on the IQ remote it says Wi-Fi pair or power G pair. So we're going to click power G pair. And as you can see same thing happened. It brought up a sensor confirmation. You can flip this over to check the serial number. But that is it. So we'll hit okay. It's ready now. It has added keypad three which is our IC remote here. So you got to do the same thing. You do have to configure it. And there's not really a whole lot to configure on this one. But essentially you can decide whether voice prompts are going to be on or off. Or you can name the keypad something different if you wish. And we're not going to do that. I'm just gonna click save. And then we're going to stop the auto learn. So that's re normal. As you heard it said keypad three normal. And what that means is it's all good to go. I mean it's just trying to initialize at the moment. And now we have our home screen which if you're used to or familiar with at all IQ panel 4, it looks exactly like this. So basically what we can do now is start using our keypad. And the very first thing I'm going to mess with is going to be the IQ remote, because that's going to give you the most functionality. So whenever you are on this keypad, as you can see, we have a list of our active sensors right here. My front door sensor is open. It's sitting over there on the desk somewhere. I'm not going to be messing with it today because we don't really need to, but you can see all your sensors listed here. So if you click all at the top right here, it will show you all connected devices. So if it's under active it's only going to show up if that zone is active. So if it's open if it's tampered if there's a trouble with it, whatever the case may be, that's the only time you'll see it under the active section. If you just need to see what all zones are paired, you can click all and it'll give you a full list there. And it also shows our two keypads.
So for arming and disarming this big square or this big rectangle over here is going to be your arming menu. Now when you first click it it's going to ask if you want to arm stay or arm away. Now those are pretty straightforward arms stay. If you're staying home, arm away. If you're going to be leaving. But if we need to adjust the arming parameters you can click this little arrow that's on the right side here. So the left arm system type. And that opens up a side menu to where you can bypass zones if you want to. But you can turn on and off the exit sounds. So if you're arming stay and you don't want to listen to it, beep beep. While it counts at all, you can click that to turn it off, and you can turn on and off the entry delay for the system. So let's say you're arming stay at night time before you go to bed. And you would rather your front door instead of having a delay on it. The instant trigger. You turn off the entry delay here. And that way if a sensor is triggered during the night, it will automatically set the system off. Instead of giving you the normal 30s to however long you set it. So that is the arming functionality for it. Now, if you want to go into the settings that are available to this keypad, there's a little top menu there. You can see the little gray little bar there. You just grab that and pull down. Now this is going to be a sound slider for this keypad. And this is going to be a brightness slider for this keypad. Adjust those as necessary. And then if you want to change settings there's a settings button here a photo frame. What that means is you can put pictures on these icon remotes using an SD card. Or you got a clean screen option and the clean screen. It basically just makes it so you can't push any buttons on it for I think, 30s to a minute so that you can wipe the screen down. If we click on settings here, though, for user code, it's going to ask you for a user code. Once you get in there, you'll have an about section. And that's going to talk about the system itself. So you can click on each of these and it'll give you some updates on the current system status. And if you click Master Reset, that master resets this keypad. So what that does is it erases everything that this keypad knows about itself and deletes it from the system. So only do that if you absolutely have to. But there's a Wi-Fi option here as well. So if you want to pair this to Wi-Fi after you've connected it through power G, you can do so here.
The display that is going to basically bring up, a brightness option, a font size option. So if you have trouble seeing you can make the text larger and enter user code. Some of these like that will kick you back out to the main screen. But it's kind of just like when it's a big change like that, it's changing all the font it has to back out and basically update before you can go back into it. But anyway, you can also change the 24 hour format. So, for your time, if you like standard time format, you can leave it that way, or you can turn it to 24 hour format, adjust that as needed. And then the IQ remote power upgrade that is going to allow you to push firmware updates to the keypad. I shouldn't have clicked on it because now it's actually checking to see if there's an update available. So after I click that, you can see it went through a little, setup where it was checking to see if there's an available update. It found one. So it is automatically downloading it. So that is one nice feature about these keypads because it uses power G and the system itself is connected to my Wi-Fi, it can find those updates and do them itself if need be. So it's going to apply the patch. I didn't think there was a patch available, but I'll let it finish and then I'll be right back.
All right, so the system's back up now that probably takes about five minutes, so don't do that if you're in a hurry. But it is a good idea every once in a while to check and see if there's a firmware update that's been pushed just to keep your stuff up to date as best you can. So we're going to go back into settings real quick. And we do the IQ pg user code upgrade. So we're going to go to power G Remote settings. So if we click on that there's not much you can really do with this. the keypad itself is pretty standard right at the moment. So it just has a power management option. And all that does is it tries to conserve power. I generally leave that on unless you absolutely need to max out the sound and the brightness for this keypad. basically this is going to keep the keypad running longer. If you happen to lose power to your home. if this isn't on and you have everything maxed out, whenever you lose AC power to this device, it can run down the battery pretty quickly. It'll probably still last you a couple hours, but you're not going to get the full 24 that they all say this battery is going for. So just keep that in mind. you can turn that off if you want, but like I said, I'd recommend leaving it on, and the only other option from there is going to be the power G system logs. So basically what you can do when you, do this, it uploads the logs for this device to the IQ4NS. So that's it really for settings on this device. as I mentioned, these keypads are basically just for normal user functions. So you're not going to get a whole lot of super in-depth functionality, like you can't program with these or anything that's all done through the app, but these are good for just standard use scenarios. So this little, envelope up here at the top right, this is going to be, your event log. So you can show any time, like a device's tamper, the panel powers, door window devices or tamper, things like that. And then over here in the contact us section, this is going to display information that you plugged in during the installer wizard on the app. But anyway, the main thing you're going to be using here is going to be the alerts and alarms. And if you click this button here, you can acknowledge all of them. And that just wipes it out. And that way you're left with a fresh clean screen. And the only other thing you can really do with this keypad here is down here at the bottom right, you'll see, a shield fire and a plus. And basically if you click those, those are going to be your panic triggers. And one thing to keep in mind, period, all these panics, they are only going to work properly if you have them connected to service. if this is a completely local system, the only thing these are going to do is if you choose one of these top three options, it's going to sound the alarm. If you choose one of these two bottom options, it won't do anything because it's going to be silent. It won't show anything. It's just going to attempt to send a panic signal out.
So that is the local set up for the IQ remote panel. Now we scoot on over to the power G DSC neo keypad functionality is almost identical, except it is condensed down into, just a screen, with words. Instead of being a touchscreen. So as you can see there, it is showing, scroll open zones, like I said, the door contacts open. So you're going to see that constantly, but it will still let me arm because I can bypass that if I want. if we scroll over it does show just front door and it stops scrolling constantly. If I had other open sensors, it would list them in order as I scrolled. So if you want to access any other functionality on the system through this keypad, though, you hit the start button and this brings up a menu. Now you can scroll through and choose what option, but those options are going to be zoned bypass System troubles, alarm memory door chime access codes, user functions, output controls, and no entry arming. No entry arming, quick arming and exit. So I'm not going to go in-depth on all of these. But basically if we go back to the beginning zone, bypass allows you to scroll through your zones and bypass the ones you want. System troubles. It is going to show any troubles that you have on the system alarm memory. That's going to show any previous alarms that the system currently still remembers. Next is a door chime. So if you hit start on door chime, it just toggles on and off the chime for this keypad. So the next one is access codes, and that one you actually cannot use with this system. basically it is they want you to program access codes through, the IQ installer app. So, that's fair considering how the system set up. But if you were using a regular, IQ 4, I believe this options available, and if you are using the DSC neo, obviously access codes can be changed through the keypad. And the next one is going to be user functions. We'll click on that. And that's going to show the event buffer that shows all events up to I believe 2000 previous events. So that can be armed, disarms, alarms, pretty much anything that happens on the system that's going to show up there. time and date, you can change the time and date for the panel, auto arm and disarm you. I don't believe you can turn this on. Yeah, you can't turn that on with the IQ4NS, that is only through a longarm that you have that functionality with the system.
The system test also does not work just because that is for the DSC neo system. So dLSS that is also for the neo user call up is to walk test is too late to open. Okay. So most of these options are not going to be available to the IQ4NS. But once you go over here to Bright Control, that's going to change the brightness for this keypad contrast contrast for this keypad buzzer control changes the sound of the keypad and authorize update. That is only for DSC Neo systems as well. So I'm gonna go back page and so the next thing we're going to look at is going to be, output control. That is only for the DSC neo and no entry arming. That is the same as if you turned off entry delays when arming with this keypad basically sets your delayed zones so that there is no delay so that everything becomes an instant trigger. Quick arming that allows you to basically just hold the circle button on the keypad to arm the system. After that is the exit button. So all that does is just back you back out. Now for this keypad, if you just want to arm and disarm normally, typically you just type in your code. So if I type in one, two, three, four it will start arming. Front door bypass. So to stop it just type in your code again. And it will disarm the system arm. So this style keypad is really only used for arming and disarming. it doesn't really give a whole lot of information or functionality outside of that. So like I said, generally I recommend the IQ remotes because it's a little bit nicer interface, but easier to figure out what you're doing as far as keypads go for this system. that is how you would use it locally. like I said, these are the only two options for keypads that are available right now. they may have other options in the future, but basically, IQ remotes are going to be your touchscreen. Nice looking, user friendly version of the keypad, the DSC neo wireless keypad. That's kind of the dumb down button style just arming and disarming keypad that's going to do it for me today. You guys have a good one, and I will catch you on the next one.