Anyone recommend a good quality alarm?

Hi,

I'm in the market for an alarm for a domestic house.

I need:

20 wired zones (achieved by add on zone expanders if necessary) to use EOL wiring (I don't want wireless and I have a lot of rooms plus a garage and server room/headend to protect.)

Must support 3 wired keypads (front door, back door and Landing)

Onboard POTS PSTN modem

Support for connection to smoke detectors, heat detectors and CO detectors via a change over relay contacts.

ability to add an ethernet module (so I can log into alarm remotely via boradband from anywhere)

Ability to add GSM/GPRS (to send text messages to my mobile phone & and secondary comms back up should POTS PSTN or Ethernet go down).

I've been looking at the Honeywell G2-20 and Honeywell Galaxy Flex FX020.

The Galaxy Flex seems overkill with DCM support (door control module) and ARC support and a gazillion programming options relating to the SIA.

The G2-20 seems like a good solution so far.

Any comment on using the G2-20 or galaxy flex in a domestic environment or can anyone else suggest other alternative alarm panels?

Regards

Stephen.

Cytech Comfort does all this. Mine are 12 years old now and did

8-64 inputs/zones (individually configurable for NO, NC, dual EOL or not, etc) and 8-64 outputs. Biggest configuration in a single panel system was 24 inputs/zones and 8 outputs, but you can have up to 4 panels spread around larger premises for more local connections of 16 zones/inputs and 16 outputs each, and the panels are linked with a single (twisted) pair bus and ground connection. It supports up to 8 keypads, and any house phone can also be used as a keypad (although you probably wouldn't want to use a phone for the main entry/exit keypads and you must have one real keypad). Keypads can be used as intercoms and baby monitors and there's a built-in answerphone with multiple mailboxes, but I've never used any of this.

I'm not up to date with sizing of their current models, but I know they can now go much bigger than this with zone expanders, which mine doesn't support, and they may also have some cheaper less expandable systems.

Ethernet and RS232 access is available. These are a raw API interface and don't provide higher level features such as web access, but I think they now provide PC software which does that. I wrote my own a long time ago though. Their APIs are all documented, specifically so you can build your own software and hardware interfaces (I've done both).

It's not cheap though, and probably only worthwhile if you are intending to use its extensive programmable home automation features too, although it is primarily an alarm. It supports DCM and ARC, but you simply ignore these parts of the configuration if you don't use them.

However, you will have to learn how to program it at some level to configure the zones to do what you want. I'm used to programming it raw from the keypads and have written some of my own tools to interface to it, but I think nowadays, most customers who do their own configuration and professional installers use Cytech's Windows application to interface to program it, which probably makes things much easier.