Alarm Relay wants to charge for open/closing reports

[EOppegaard]

Thanks for your test, I think we have been dealing with a differing of definition of what "Open/Close" is.

Open/Close as I and AlarmRelay were referring means when one arms or disarms the system. This is confirmed by your test that when you arm the system in stay, it dials out to give a "Close" report which means the system is armed.

When you physically open or close a door, this would be a zone follow that is managed by the EnvisaLink.

[hokie]

I've been watching this post with much interest. I just signed up with Alarm Relay last week. Although I had not purchased the envisalink module yet, I had planned to do so this week and add it to my Vista 21ip panel.

I thought the envisalink was a much better deal than the total connect option through alarm relay.

Now I'm second guessing having signed up with Alarm Relay. (I have the phone line monitoring with the GSM back up).

Is there any way to use the *49 programming feature to change what goes to the central station? I'm a little fuzzy on what the various options for that field are, but it seems to change what reports go to the primary and seconday number that Alarm Relay has loaded into the system. I'm thinking either a) i misunderstand what that does or b) its unique to the 21ip. Otherwise someone might have already tried that programing field as a potential solution for the 20p that the original post was about.

Thanks

[EOppegaard]

Hey Hokie,

I don't regret going with AlarmRelay. They have been pretty receptive to trying to get it to work, and I really do think their customer service is high despite my technical issues.

As far as sending specific things to the communicator, there isn't a way to separate the signals on the Ademco panels for Open/Close signals (Arming and Disarming the system). You can enable split reporting, however that doesn't help in this specific scenario.

[hokie]

Thanks for the clarification. I figured there must have been something I was missing with that *49 field.

One last question... I did go in an look around at how Alarm Relay had configured all my settings. Turns out they had already turned on a bunch of those reporting codes. Does that mean i man not see a hike if i add the envisalink since they should already be getting all those event logs? Were your reporting codes all turned off or on before you added the envisalink?

Just trying to get a feel for what I will be up against when I broach this subject with tech support and/or the account folks.

So far I've been "mostly" happy with their tech support. There was alot of confusion getting the gsm module turned on with alarmnet and there were some stumbling blocks with the programming. We'll see how it goes from here.

Thanks

[PinkFloydMusic]

One last question... I did go in an look around at how Alarm Relay had configured all my settings. Turns out they had already turned on a bunch of those reporting codes. Does that mean i man not see a hike if i add the envisalink since they should already be getting all those event logs? Were your reporting codes all turned off or on before you added the envisalink?

Just trying to get a feel for what I will be up against when I broach this subject with tech support and/or the account folks.......

Hello Folks,
I too have been watching this thread related to the EnvisaLink and AlarmRelay. This is my first post as I only recently added the EVL3 to my Vista-20P panel and I also use AlarmRelay (whom I have had super good experience with their support!

I'm an electronics and software engineer (double major), so I installed the Vista-20P system myself and programmed it three years ago. When I added the EnvisaLink recently, all is working just as I prefer.

If I am understanding (and my terms may not be correct), some people want to know in REAL TIME about zone opening and closing via a reporting method? And is it this type of reporting that is causing the problem?

My system is set up such that I don't care about getting real time events as to what is being opened or closed. I only care about arming, disarming and real-time alarms. However, if I want to see what has recently occurred, I go into the Eyez-on web portal via my iPhone to see what zones recently triggered. In the default setup, no events being reported to AlarmRelay (I use a POTS line), so obviously they are not complaining about anything my EnvisaLink is doing.

I like the 8-10 types of reports that can be sent as an email or text to my cell phone for various events such as arming, alarms, system trouble, etc, so I have my Eyez-On account set up to report these events as texts to my cell phone.

I am not getting real time events of when a zone opens or closes, but I was assuming that in the Eyez-On web portal that the "Followers" checkbox was for that purpose. I have it turned off because I don't want those real-time events coming to my phone and I have not tried that process.

What am I misunderstanding about the type of reporting that some people want to do?

Richard

[EOppegaard]

I like the 8-10 types of reports that can be sent as an email or text to my cell phone for various events such as arming, alarms, system trouble, etc, so I have my Eyez-On account set up to report these events as texts to my cell phone.

Hi Richard, I apologize as I am not a double major, however I did install our Vista 20p panel, and Envisalink myself as well.

Open/Closing in the Security System World refers to arming and disarming of the system. As stated previously in this thread, we are not looking for individual zone events, we are looking for alerts as to when the system is armed and disarmed and by what user code.

It seems as though you have found a way to do this without sending an open/close report to the central station. Is this correct? In going throughout this process, I have wished there was a way for when the alarm status changed, it would send an alert by using the status online. Obviously this would not be as quick as a report going from the system, but would work.

Hopefully you can shed some light on this situation.

[PinkFloydMusic]

... As stated previously in this thread, we are not looking for individual zone events, we are looking for alerts as to when the system is armed and disarmed and by what user code.

It seems as though you have found a way to do this without sending an open/close report to the central station. Is this correct? .... Hopefully you can shed some light on this situation.

Hi, sorry for the delay. I've been traveling and got home last night to do some testing.
Several thoughts and comments below. Thanks for the info and terminology. Once upon a time I knew these terms as I had two summer jobs installing alarms in high school. That was long ago though.

After some experimenting, I'm not able to get "open / close" reports via sms on my iPhone. I expected I should get them since the web interface shows that capability. The "zone followers" got reported to me along with the "supervision line / cuts", "system troubles", so I expected arming and disarming to work as well, yet when I tried it, nothing happened. I did not try the alarm and alarm restoral alerts as I did not want to wake up everyone in the house. Thus, it seems like a software bug where not every type of event is reported. Some do and some don't.

Since the alarm panel reporting and Eyez-on reporting are two completely separate systems with their own ability, I was baffled why some people were saying they could not get reports without also sending them to the alarm company. I am guessing the reason it works for me is that I use a POTS line where the Vista 20P reports directly to AlarmRelay. If I were using the Eyez-On to report alarams via the internet, then I can understand that it might be difficult to separate the two functions. I am just speculating the reason since I have only had a short time to become familiar with this add-on. All I know now is I get most reports listed with the check boxes on the contact details dialog of the web interface, yet a few don't seem to work. The reports come to me via sms and are not reported to AlarmRelay via the POTS line. And that makes sense because the Vista panel is not set up to report such things to the alarm company unless there is an issue.

While I am on the subject, the sms and email reporting isn't very reliable on my system. There are long lags. Example, while experimenting, I had EZ set to report "Zone Followers". Then I triggered a zone (Laundry door). Within seconds I get an SMS alert. In fact I always seem to get TWO of the same alert at the same time. However, the "close door" event seems to come 4 or 5 minutes later! Sometimes even the open event isn't reported for several minutes. I am certain this is not due to my internet connectivity. I've got a super reliable, very high speed connection and EZ is directly wired to the router. The issue seems to be a reporting delay with the hardware.

Another issue is that the EZ server and the hardware panel don't sync well. It might be due to the EZ server. Sometimes it is slower that other times. Example. I armed my system via cell phone, but it took many minutes for the message to be received by my EZ hardware. Once I went to my alarm keypad and disabled the alarm, but then another two or three arming requests came back in to the panel to rearm it again. EZ should be smart enough to look at the command request time to determine if it should be ignoring the command or not. This is how most async devices work to determine which command to execute. You only want the latest one to execute.

In summary, I can't really depend on the EZ to reliably arm the system remotely since I don't get any SMS report back that it did what I told it to do, so I have to keep checking the status of the web interface on my phone to see if it really did arm or not. Long delays and multiple messages seem to be the biggest problem.

Yea, so I got off on a side track, but I thought it might be appropriate to point out the quirks in getting messages. Even when it does work with some types of reports, there are delays and multiple messages coming.

[DeanRobinson]

I see the same conditions, It seems that I get the opening reports very fast, But the closing reports take 5-7 Min. It seems that opening reports get a higher priority.

Dean

[GrandWizard]

I see the same conditions, It seems that I get the opening reports very fast, But the closing reports take 5-7 Min. It seems that opening reports get a higher priority.

It's all in the FAQ my friend. You should read it before posting.

[DeanRobinson]

I did go through all 15 of the FAQ, I must of missed something. I will go over them again. Unless there is other list of FAQ I have not seen. Will dig through the forum.

Ok I found it, I over looked the time period of 2 events in a time period.
Will try and read the FAQ's a bit closer.

Thanks!