I am soon to move into a new property and want an alarm system for the house. Ideally id like it to be able to link into HA.
I have had a look on the components page for supported HA Alarms and most of them seem to be US based products. Wink seems to be the product I can get in the UK, however the motion sensors/window sensors are battery operated and do not have replaceable batteries in them so the entire unit needs to be replaced every couple years. At around £29+ a sensor, if I end up with a lot of sensors over time thats going to be a lot of money to keep replacing them. Unless someone can tell me if you can jimmy the device open and some how replace the battery yourself.
Has anyone else in the UK had any experience with alarm integation into HA?
I have exactly the same issue as well. Looking to remodel some of the house and replace the current outdated alarm system. Ideally I would like to reuse a lot of the wires that are already in place and some of the PIR sensors.
For what it’s worth I picked up a DSC PC1864, keypad and 3 wireless sensors from eBay for about £30. Was going to have a go at programming myself which I’ve started today and try out the Evisalink interface.
I don’t mind going down this route but Not sure of the home Insurance recognises and alarm that is not serviced by a professional installer.
Will let you know how I get in with the second hand DSC (so far I’ve sucesssfully managed to factory reset it) and I ordered the Envisink today.
Do you need a control panel in reality?
I have mine to just give me a notification if me AND the wife are out of the house and the motion sensors are triggered.
I don’t have any cameras yet, but then I would look at what’s going on and ring the police if needed.
I am looking into this and we set the alarm at night… but only for downstairs omitting upstairs. I use a hidden xiaomi button behind my bedside cupboard as a “everything off that needs to be off” button, i.e. lights before we sleep… I was thinking of adding that as setting the alarm as well. In that case I would really need a panel either, as I plan to use the “if we are both out, set the alarm”
but it gets more complicated with pets, as some days we let the cats roam around downstairs, other days we stick them upstairs… so I have sensors on 2 of the internal doors that would be open if we are leaving them downstairs, so they could be part of the condition… still not made this wife proof hence I haven’t put it into operation yet
i have a Hills Reliance R8 system( available pretty much everywhere), i got a ComNav ($150AUD so about 90GBP) board for it (not required but handy to control the alarm remotely from an app). i have configured one of the comnav relays to switch when the alarm is armed, this is then connected to the gpio 14 of a Sonoff that has been flashed with Tasmota, this then signals MQTT, From there HA sees the change and then signals ZoneMinder to switch the cameras from monitor to motion detection. i’m sure you can do it in other ways though.
The enhancements i’ll be making is a second input that is switched when the alarm is triggered, this will switch all cameras to full record and if the sun is down then switch on all the house lights.
I need to keep with a wired alarm panel for family and other reasons.
I need to buy a new panel and ideally would get one that is compatible with alarmdecoder, Envisalink or directly with Homeassistant. I know I can hack a nodeMCU/ similar into the system to monitor the various status’s but this won’t allow me to set/ unset remotley…
Does anyone know a UK available panel that can be fully integrated with HA?
I see there is a thread in the hardware section discussing the Texacom panels:
0.78 release includes Yale alarm system, looks cheap and cheerful, anyone have experience with them?
I’m particularly interested to know if you can access all the PIR sensor data.
