Replacing legacy alarm with Yale Sync smart alarm

My house came a legacy hardwired alarm Aritech CS350 (discontinued 2006). I didn’t trust it’s reliability and wanted some remote monitoring functionality.

I wated something 100% stand alone so I went with a Yale Sync smart home alarm. Generally I have been happy with it apart from needing to move one of the Smoke/Heat/PIR sensors as the PIR sensor was getting falsely triggered by its proximity to a radiator. I was easily able to bring this in to Home Assistant using the Yale Smart Living. It relies on cloud polling but that’s fine for me. All it’s sensors are battery powered and it’s hub has a battery backup which means the unit functions in power outage.

Using Konnected and Alarmo

I removed the legacy alarm panel but did not remove the sensors. I wanted to see if I could get some value from them to augment the Yale alarm. For this I came across Konnected. I got the most basic 6 Zone board. It was $99 in Aug 22 when I bought which did feel high, now in Dec 22 it is $59 which is much more reasonable.

I bought a 12V 2A adapter on Amazon and installed the Konnected board. My distrust of the old alarm was proved valid. One contact sensor zone on a door had a large delay to close and another on windows would trip in windy weather, I will adjust this sensors to fix the issue at a later date. These issues would have had the legacy alarm constantly triggering when armed annoying my neighbours.

To bring in to Home Assistant was very easy by using the Konnected integration. This made the sensors available but to treat them as an alarm needs a separate integration. Alarmo is the integration which turns the sensors in to an alarm system. Using a mixture of Alarmo and standard automations I now have:

• If Yale is triggered then Alarmo triggers.
• If Alarmo is triggered it triggers the Yale panic button.
• If either alarm is set/unset the other will match it’s state.

I have also integrated a Zigbee leak detector in to Alarmo by my washing machine in case of issues. Alarmo has functionality for sensors like this were you get alerted regardless of whether the alarm is set or not.

Using Konnected to monitor hot water tank temperatures

To get most value out of the Konnected board I looked through the docs and saw you can attach temperature or humidity probes. to it. I thought this would be useful as by chance my alarm hub is situated beside my (very small 90L) water cylinder. Unfortunately the docs detailed this only using an add-on board which I did not want to pay for.

Since I saw the option in the software still I thought I would try anyway. The main issue was that the board did not expose a 5V line like the add-on boards did. Luckily I had a small Sparkfun power supply lying around. I wired this up to to the 12V adapter to give me a 5V source. Then I wired in my 3 2 meter long DS18B20 temperature probes with the data line going to a free zone on the Konnected Board and their +/- going to the Sparkfun board. The sensors then showed up in Home Assistant without issue.

This link shows the full install in detail, messy wiring included. I did clean it up (somewhat) after but do not have a picture of that.

My existing home heating system by EPH has 1 temperature probe which tells me the temperature at the top of the tank only.

Now with the Konnected board I have 3 additional sensors top/middle/bottom. This gives me much better insight into the water temperature in the tank.

I like to use the Gauge Card as well for the current status.