EDIT: First schoolboy error its a 2-12 not 2-20
So ADT installed our system in 2010. Initially the cost including a separate gsm connection was around £28 per month (on top of the 4 figure installation amount). It seemed to go up and up until when I last checked it was getting close to £60 so I decided to cancel.
The difficulty in cancelling is almost worthy of another thread but this is a diy forum so won't go into too much detail there.
Anyway, I had some fun this afternoon trying to switch it off with a view to (at some later date) hopefully being able to reset it, get the engineering code, play around with it and possibly use it for my own needs.
The first issue I had was that it was on an electrical circuit whose circuit breaker had been bypassed at the consumer unit making it not clear (to me anyway) why the mains wasn't going away when I popped the cb.
Then I removed the screw from the panel casing expecting an event to occur and it did. Rightly or wrongly (probably wrongly!) I jammed the lid tamper switch to make it think the lid was still on. I then removed positive to the battery and at that point the siren went off (which I was trying to avoid). Thankfully as soon as I reconnected the battery, it silenced but it didn't make much sense to me - there's no AC and the battery has gone - how could the sirens be going off?
Then I realised the box under the main circuit board might also have a battery so I went through the same process with that. It did indeed have its own battery - I think that box does the GSM stuff.
However, I still had no joy with the sirens! Finally, it dawned on me that at least one of the internal sirens much have its own battery and sure enough that was the issue.
So, I've now popped the fuses within both boxes and also disabled the battery in one of the sirens (the other one seemed more dumb and didn't have its own battery).
So the alarm is now fully switched off and life is good. However, it would be great to know how to reset it ("defaulting" I understand it is called in the industry).
From reading other threads I can see most professional engineers in the industry frown on releasing such information. I kind of get that in that why would you give a random person on a forum who might be a burglar (or maybe more likely someone reading this) those details but if it was possible for even the most experienced engineer to defeat an alarm system that was "set" without knowing any of the codes then surely that would be a design fault.
Now I know the "manager" code and a "user" code for my panel and I've found out today just how much Honeywell have thought about this system's design. Even if someone was kind enough to tell me how to reset it, I can't believe it would help any burglar who would be dealing with a live "set" system. Even though my system was unset and I was regularly attempting to acknowledge the events, I suspect each time the siren went off, a signal was sent to ADT towers (or whoever they use to monitor) which would have been ignored in my case as I'm no longer a customer but surely a burglar dealing with a live system would have had no chance defaulting a "set" system before feeling the long arm of the law tapping him on his shoulder....
Anyway, on the off chance someone is kind enough to tell me or PM me I've attached a picture of my board. I've read already it involves connecting two terminals and powering on but I've also read such connection needs a resistor in series so a bit confused on the detail of that.
A final thought is that I work in information security and I suspect there are a fair few parallels. The relevant one being that computer security network protocols work on the principle that the detail of how they operate is an open standard and that the security of said protocols are entirely based on the difficulty of guessing a very large number (key as it is known). Anything else is considered security by obfuscation and is frowned upon not least because it makes it hard for researchers to attack those protocols to really probe the security of the protocol itself.
So ADT installed our system in 2010. Initially the cost including a separate gsm connection was around £28 per month (on top of the 4 figure installation amount). It seemed to go up and up until when I last checked it was getting close to £60 so I decided to cancel.
The difficulty in cancelling is almost worthy of another thread but this is a diy forum so won't go into too much detail there.
Anyway, I had some fun this afternoon trying to switch it off with a view to (at some later date) hopefully being able to reset it, get the engineering code, play around with it and possibly use it for my own needs.
The first issue I had was that it was on an electrical circuit whose circuit breaker had been bypassed at the consumer unit making it not clear (to me anyway) why the mains wasn't going away when I popped the cb.
Then I removed the screw from the panel casing expecting an event to occur and it did. Rightly or wrongly (probably wrongly!) I jammed the lid tamper switch to make it think the lid was still on. I then removed positive to the battery and at that point the siren went off (which I was trying to avoid). Thankfully as soon as I reconnected the battery, it silenced but it didn't make much sense to me - there's no AC and the battery has gone - how could the sirens be going off?
Then I realised the box under the main circuit board might also have a battery so I went through the same process with that. It did indeed have its own battery - I think that box does the GSM stuff.
However, I still had no joy with the sirens! Finally, it dawned on me that at least one of the internal sirens much have its own battery and sure enough that was the issue.
So, I've now popped the fuses within both boxes and also disabled the battery in one of the sirens (the other one seemed more dumb and didn't have its own battery).
So the alarm is now fully switched off and life is good. However, it would be great to know how to reset it ("defaulting" I understand it is called in the industry).
From reading other threads I can see most professional engineers in the industry frown on releasing such information. I kind of get that in that why would you give a random person on a forum who might be a burglar (or maybe more likely someone reading this) those details but if it was possible for even the most experienced engineer to defeat an alarm system that was "set" without knowing any of the codes then surely that would be a design fault.
Now I know the "manager" code and a "user" code for my panel and I've found out today just how much Honeywell have thought about this system's design. Even if someone was kind enough to tell me how to reset it, I can't believe it would help any burglar who would be dealing with a live "set" system. Even though my system was unset and I was regularly attempting to acknowledge the events, I suspect each time the siren went off, a signal was sent to ADT towers (or whoever they use to monitor) which would have been ignored in my case as I'm no longer a customer but surely a burglar dealing with a live system would have had no chance defaulting a "set" system before feeling the long arm of the law tapping him on his shoulder....
Anyway, on the off chance someone is kind enough to tell me or PM me I've attached a picture of my board. I've read already it involves connecting two terminals and powering on but I've also read such connection needs a resistor in series so a bit confused on the detail of that.
A final thought is that I work in information security and I suspect there are a fair few parallels. The relevant one being that computer security network protocols work on the principle that the detail of how they operate is an open standard and that the security of said protocols are entirely based on the difficulty of guessing a very large number (key as it is known). Anything else is considered security by obfuscation and is frowned upon not least because it makes it hard for researchers to attack those protocols to really probe the security of the protocol itself.
Attachments
Last edited:
