Keeping it secure (Part 1) - Honeywell Lyric Alarm System

 When I bought the house, I wanted to install an Alarm System. In January of 2017, Honeywell were the first to announce they would support HomeKit, and do so on the Honeywell Lyric. In 2018, Honeywell spun off the business and called it Resideo.

Initially they said 3 months, but it was more like 6 months.... and then you need to have a service to get the HomeKit integration. 

I had my installation professionally done. In retrospect, I could've done it myself. It consists of:

• Honeywell SIXt door and window contact sensors
• Motion Sensors
• AT&T LTE Module (Should the internet go down)
• Battery Backup (Should power go down)
• Smoke Detectors

The actual device supports z-wave and seems to be Honeywell's bid to do home automation. However, it only exposes the contact sensors, the motion sensors and the panel itself to HomeKit. None of the other items are exposed, and Honeywell are not very communicative about any future plans. I think because this is designed for a device for professionals to install and run a service.

It actually is not that difficult to install, as I've found out as my local service company want to charge me a service fee every month and then charge me more for someone to come out. I finally got them to let me make changes myself. If I was buying now, I'd buy from alarmgrid.com and take up their service. It would save a chunk of money!

My biggest functional issues are:

• The panel user interface is slow and not well designed
• I get woken up for unnecessary things, e.g. a battery is running low and teh alarm goes off at 4am! There should be a way to define low level alarms that wait until a certain time to go off.
• It doesn't show the battery status inside HomeKit.

Fortunately, for the first one there is an app, Honeywell Total Connect 2.0 or you can connect on the web too. What's nice is that it is also available for tvOS, WatchOS, iPadOS as well as iOS.

This isn't exactly a real time interface. So if you clear a "Trouble" then you have to refresh to see the latest status. This is because it isn't connecting to your panel, but to the central service.

Inside HomeKit, it looks a little different.

On the left, you can see you can Alarm it Away or Home. With Home it will ignore motion sensors but it will arm exit/perimeter sensors which includes Windows.... sucks for when you live in a warm weather climate and you want a window open just a tad. There is an Arm Custom, but you can only do that from the keypad.. and it isn't a setting you can just do every night... so basically useless!

On the right you can see my Garage. At the top you can see:

• 3 motions sensors, one of which is the Lyric
• Entry, which is the side door and is covered by the Lyric
• 3 Windows, which are contact sensors from the Lyric.

You can automate on anything here.

Automation

It's really quite simple. We use Geofencing. So, when the last of two people, which are myself and my spouse, leave the house then the house will lock all the doors and arm "Away".

You can also set it up, in the Lyric controller, so that if you Arm away and you leave a door or a window open it will actually "Arm Stay" and ignore any perimeter faults currently running.