Elk M1 wireless option

J

jdespars

Member
I need to expand my Elk M1 Wireless as I want to connect my garage to my home system.  The garage is about 150 feet from the house.  I am trying to decide between one of the 3 following as reciever/transceiver:
 * Elk (bi directional) M1XRFTW
 * GE M1XRFEG
 * Honywell M1XRF2H
 
The 3 are probably very good, and the Elk has the added benefit of bi directional.  But I am more interested in having it reliable and robust.  Anybody ever compared the 3 for distance coverage? reliability.  I am curious as to why the elk uses 900 Mhz frequency.  Is it better than the 320 Mhz used with the GE
 
I can't speak for these three, but one thing to note is that you can get repeaters for GE sensors.  There are actually a very different brands of GE repeater, and they have saved me on occasions.  If you installed one halfway between your garage and house it would likely solve and range problems.  I have one made by "Resolution Products" but there are others as well.
 
Thanks i am tending to use the GE. The Resolution also seem to provide good batterie life. Sense there will be some trial and error in setting this up
 
I can't speak for the Elk and GE as I have the M1XRF2H receiver. That receiver and the Honeywell 5816's work easily over a 150' range for me and go through a metal roof to boot.
 
GE and Honeywell both offer repeaters. If you're pushing RF any distance, you'll have problems no matter what technology or manufacturer, the larger variable is frequency of the device.
 
I think GE and Honeywell have the Elk RF beat and I'm on the level of believing that the Elk RF, while "better on paper" isn't the entirely best choice. I've installed tens of thousand RF Honeywell devices and thousands of GE (back to the ITI days) and they're proven, Elk is not.
 
I've installed (3) M1XRFTW's and approx. 60 Elk wireless sensors. Having said that, I wouldn't rely on them under the conditions you stated (150' range). If you could put the M1XRFTW in the garage, sure. Understand that you can install multiple M1XRFTW's in a single installation.
 
Thanks for the comments!


drvnbysound, you are confirming my concerns. My house is all wired on my elk m1. I built the garage (accros the street) and did not run a cable to my elk panel when I had the chance. I did however run a 220 volt cable buried between the house and the garage So the wireless option I am considering is to put the tranceiver in the house and put wirelles sensors in the garage. I could install a repeater in the garage or up in my garage attic??

Any technology that could modulate over my ac cable could be an option?? I actually tried a UPB Input/output (simply automated UMI32) and used the 3 input as zones . It worked but i am not actaully getting real allarm zones.
 
You wouldn't be able to put one in the garage unless you were able to have it wired to the M1's databus. I wouldn't recommend the attic installation either. There are various threads on the forum here that address issues associated with mounting components in an attic.
 
What type of environment are you in/near? Urban, suburban, rural?
 
A couple of ideas come to mind. 
 
One is to use UPB UMI input/output modules to communicate contact closures from the garage to the house over the power line.  I'm not a UPB expert, so others might want to chime in here.  Reading the UMI instructions, it sounds like it should work.
 
The other is to try a using a pair of RS-485 power line transceivers to extend the M1 data bus from the house to the garage, and then attach an M1XIN in the garage. 
 
I recall reading some discussion about extending the 485 bus in other threads, and I'm not sure this will work.  It will probably come down to a question of whether the latency through the transceivers mess up the timing of the bus enough so that the M1 won't be happy.  If I recall the other discussions correctly, some said that using transceivers will not work, but I think the goal was to exceed the 4000' spec of the bus.   For a short distance of a few hundred feet, it might have a chance.
 
Interesting ideas

I am in a rural environement. It is a house on a lakeside.The garage is on my other lot across a street(about 150 feet between the 2)

The UPB UMI option works. I did some tests and actually put a UPB i/o device and did some testing. But I doubt of the reliability as it is not an alarm system. But if at the end of the day if it is more reliable than wireless I would consider it

Now for the RS 485 tranceivers over ac cabling i will look into this. I never saw Elk promote this?

Damn i should have buried a 4 conducter wire when I had the chance to cross the road
 
 
 
kojack said:
Damn i should have buried a 4 conducter wire when I had the chance to cross the road
Click to expand...
Nope. Never bury wire directly, always put it in a conduit. It allows you to make changes later on.
 
RAL said:
A couple of ideas come to mind. 
 
One is to use UPB UMI input/output modules to communicate contact closures from the garage to the house over the power line.  I'm not a UPB expert, so others might want to chime in here.  Reading the UMI instructions, it sounds like it should work.
 
The other is to try a using a pair of RS-485 power line transceivers to extend the M1 data bus from the house to the garage, and then attach an M1XIN in the garage. 
 
I recall reading some discussion about extending the 485 bus in other threads, and I'm not sure this will work.  It will probably come down to a question of whether the latency through the transceivers mess up the timing of the bus enough so that the M1 won't be happy.  If I recall the other discussions correctly, some said that using transceivers will not work, but I think the goal was to exceed the 4000' spec of the bus.   For a short distance of a few hundred feet, it might have a chance.
Click to expand...
For the UPB workaround you'd need to do it twice - contacts into UPB then at the panel, another UPB I/O feeding into hardwired zones on the panel.  But I don't think I'd do that...
 
Elk has reported that they've tried different types of media converters with their RS485 implementation with zero success.  I doubt you're going to extend it unfortunately.
 
42etus said:
 
 
Nope. Never bury wire directly, always put it in a conduit. It allows you to make changes later on.
Click to expand...
  :hesaid:  :hesaid:   I would've put an empty 4" along side but a foot away from the electric one.
 
If it's important enough to you, they have guys who can trench across a road without cutting it.  The cost isn't bad - it's comparable to the cost of regular trenching but without the patch-work and some of the approval hassles.
 
In a rural environment, you likely don't have the wireless interference that suburban and urban areas have - you may be able to get the 150' range you are looking for, but it's pretty much impossible to say for sure without trying it yourself. You could try putting the wireless transceiver in your home, in the nearest location you can, toward the garage... and see what happens. Do it as a rough test first... just put it in the room with the wire laying between it and your M1. If it doesn't work you haven't wasted a lot of effort with running cable in the attic and such. This would be my first suggestion before you start seriously looking into trenching again.
 
I've exceeded that range often using the GE and Honeywell units, however prudent would be to put the house's RF receiver as close and high up/central as possible and install a RF repeater in the remote building as close to the house "side" as possible. It's not that the units won't work without a repeater, but usually reception changes over time, with weather and other variables and the pattern ends up being a missed supervisory signal from the device.
 
Elk does not make repeaters, their system requires a bus device.
 
I've spoken many times in length with Elk engineering about using 485 repeaters and/or media converters to get past the 4000' total system bus length and they've been very squeamish about me installing hardware to do that, basically talking about latency and their concerns. Unfortunately, once a project gets close to that footage or possibly exceed, without a sure bet or large gamble, I end up going a different route.
 
Ok. So i did a bit of search in the last fewdays. I will go with GE for wireless and in the garage i will get a Resolution 8 zone wired to wireless tranciever. Didnt even know this existed. I will stick the transceiver up in the garage so hopefully the wireless range will not be an issue
 
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