Recent content by Mark S.

Power supply and/or battery are my first thoughts as well. I've seen some very bizarre things happen when power is flakey.

I'm not sure exactly what you are trying to do, but I use ELK counters as "flags" to communicate back and forth between HA-ELK and HS-ELK. In other words - if ELK Counter 1 changes to 1, then do this; if it is 2 then do that, etc.

I imagine the XEP will be available as long as the M1 panel is available. I keep a spare XEP on hand because I had one fail, and my M1G no longer interfaces with Homeseer or HomeAssistant without it, and I don't want to wait a week to get back up and running. I try to keep a spare for critical...

It's been many years since I transitioned from the NX8E, so I've forgotten pretty much everything about it. But an alarm system is basically an I/O controller, and corruption of EEPROMs is possible. So if you prefer to stick with the NX8E, you might try save your configuration, and do a...

@dwalt So if you define your zone as a water alarm, the event can trigger on any water alarm zone, as well as an individual alarm? I defined my water sensors as non-alarm, because to be honest, I didn't even know that water alarm was an option - musta missed that.

I'm not sure I completely understand exactly what you are trying to do, but I can share what I do. I have 3 leak sensors in my basement, but I only automate my water shut-off in the event of a leak near my well tank. I also added the ability to manually shut off or retore the water by...

Actually, that PC looks great. I wish I had seen that one before I bough the one I did. It is far beefier than what you need for HS4, but I am a firm believer in always using more speed and memory than you need. My only minor concern is USBs and serial ports. I use a lot of them for HS4. So...

I think the video quality of the name brands like Sony, Samsung and LG are all pretty good - so similar that I don't see much difference. So for me, the distinguishing characteristics are the controls and interfaces. I prefer simple and intuitive. The controls and user interfaces for many...

It appears that there is no way to automate a Force Arm via ELK rules. Too bad because that would be a helpful feature. However, I can auto-arm via ELK rules if I bypass any violated zones first. So I set up my auto-arm rules to 1) Bypass all the upstairs windows, 2) Arm in Home mode, then 3)...

The ELK does have a "force armable" feature. I can set a zone to be force armable - I assume the intent is that the panel can be armed regardless of whether that zone is violated, an example being an interior zone. One more thing I should have said in my original post is that the bedroom...

After a few decades of procrastination, I finally put wireless contacts on my second floor windows. I put it off because I had other priorities, and I trusted that Spiderman would not scale my house, rather he would prefer a first floor window or door. Anyway, after all those years of no...

I think that Home Assistant is more capable than Homeseer, but the learning curve is significantly more challenging than Homeseer. Homeseer is definitely more intuitive, but Home Assistant is far more flexible - you can do almost anything if you put the time in to figuring it out. I don't see...

My issue is discussed in this Cocoontech thread. If you run Homeseer or Home Assistant with your ELK, you can see the current values of your variables on those systems. If not, I think you can see the values on an ELK LCD keypad. If you don't have that either, then you can set up a simple ELK...

Can you verify that your Counter 9 is actually working? I recently had an issue where my ELK counters starting acting flakey, then stopped working entirely. In other words, they would not change values, at all. On the advice of an ELK tech, I had to reset my panel and it fixed the problem.

I bought a spare XEP and keep it in a box, just in case.