Can I Automate Force Arm?

[Mark S.]

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 window contacts, we got used to leaving the upstairs windows open before and during sleep, with the ELK M1G auto arming to Home mode every night at 11:00 pm. But now if an upstairs window is open, ELK will no longer auto-arm, even though the alarm status now shows as force-armable. I have to manually force arm at a keypad, which I will forget to do.

I have the upstairs windows configured as both by-passable and force-armable, so I assumed armable meant that when my nightly arming event fires, ELK would still arm in Home mode because it is force-armable, which is still armable.

I do not see anything in the RP2 event programming options such as "force-arm in Home mode", only "arm in Home mode". It appears that I can create an event to bypass all those windows and then auto-arm, but it seems like force-arm is a better option because then I can see status as to which windows are open. If I bypass all the windows, the zone status shows windows only as bypassed, so I have no idea whether a window is open or not. And, of course, I don't want to automatically bypass the windows in cold weather - I want to ensure they are closed.

So my questions are: Is there a way to automate a force-arm? If I have to bypass the windows, is there any way to know which windows are open? Any other ways to do this, such as adding the windows to a new Area or some other creative way? Other advice?

 

[ano]

There is no "force arm" because if you arm an alarm with a zone not-ready it will go off immediately. I don't think that is what you want. Sometimes the alarm won't arm with a zone not-ready. (I don't know ELK) On the other hand, there usually is a feature that will auto-bypass, so if a zone is not-ready. it can bypass that zone until it is ready, then it unbypasses it. You should get an indication of a zone not-ready on the panel, and some panels have a "ready-to-arm" led.

 

[Mark S.]

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 windows are set up as "interior zones", like a motion detector, so they will not set off an alarm if tripped in Home mode. I want to be able to open and close the windows at night when armed in Home mode. So presumably, force armable would be used for such interior zones that might be violated during an arming process.

The problem is that the automated command to Arm in Home mode in the ELK rules will not force arm. If a window is open, the keypads do not say "Ready to Arm", rather they say "Ready to Force Arm". I can indeed force arm at a keypad, and I can then open more windows at will. So I can open and close bedroom windows as I wanted. The problem is that I cannot find a way to automate the force arm.

I can bypass the windows, but as I said above, then I don't know the status of the windows. Force arming lets me still see the status of each zone. Just wish I could automate the force arm somehow.

 

[Mark S.]

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) Un-bypass all bypassed zones immediately after arming. Auto-arming now works, but window status is not exactly what I wanted.

Unfortunately, using this scheme, any violated zones are not un-bypassed after arming - the status of any open window does not return to "violated", but rather stays "bypassed". But at least the bypassed status means that the window must have been open prior to arming - if its status remains "bypassed", then I know it is still open. Opening any new windows after arming shows a "violated" status (because it was un-bypassed), and does not alarm because it is an interior zone. Closing and then reopening one of the bypassed windows changes the "bypassed" status to "normal" then "violated", with no alarm, which is really where I wanted to be.

With this approach, any window that has a "bypassed" status, and/or one that is subsequently "violated" after arming, must be open, so I guess I can work with that. The intent is to use this status in another event that will shut off AC/heat if any windows are open (bypassed or violated).