No notification when alarm is actually going off

[Maxburn]

I can't believe I didn't test this earlier but I'm not getting anything via text when the alarm actually goes off.

Background; I have this on a Pi and it is emailing my cell phone to give me a text message via their sms/email gateway, works great and I get a text every arm/disarm etc. In notification events I have everything selected except faulted/restored.

Under which notification event is the alarm actually going off covered?? I guess I was assuming it was the "alarm system is triggered" item I wanted but having that selected didn't seem to get me a message when the alarm went off.

[Maxburn]

Any ideas?

It's a vista 20p panel but an oem build from ADT. Think this is something they are doing differently? I am told I should be able to tap a key to see which zone put it into alarm but I've never figured that out either.

[trialnerror]

I've got an ADT panel too and am just installing an AD2Pi. I hadn't gotten to the point of testing alarms when last night I had an unexpected test of the fire alarm with some smokey cooking. The system did email me an alert.

I have a notification called "Fire" which I've got set to trigger on notification events "A fire is detected" and "A zone has faulted", with the triggering zones set to my smoke & heat zones. One of the smoke zones triggered. The message in the AD log was type "FIRE", with the message "There is a fire! [hh:mm:ssPM Day mm/dd/yy]" (note, I hacked my messages to include times). The email out worked and had the same message. There was no indication in the AD logs which zone tripped.

I'm guessing that "A fire is detected", rather than "A zone has faulted" is how the panel responds, so that's the message I got rather than a typical zone fault message. For the burglar alarm the corresponding notification is likely "Alarm system is triggered" and it probably behaves similarly. When you set up the notification, did you try the "Save and Test" button? That can help sort out email config problems. As part of testing I'll set up another notification that only goes on a zone fault, and see if that triggers a message on which zone is problematic. It's possible that the alarm overrides the zone reporting so you won't see it in AD; testing will tell.

On my ADT panel, the offending detector did display as the alarm was going off (so I knew it was my cooking). Pressing your "off" code once silences the alarm, but leaves the zones that tripped in the display. Pressing "off" again should reset the system to normal mode. Since the AD keypad mirrors what's on the ADT display, I would think you could do the same from there.

[Maxburn]

I think maybe I didn't actually get a real alarm before. I just tested again and it does as you say, after it's cancelled it's showing alarm cancelled and flipping to the zone it was. Got all the emails for that and they clearly indicated the zone.

Before I know it was making noise and I had to code in and hit off to shut it up but after that it never displayed alarm cancelled / zone that was faulted. It just went straight back to disarmed, ready to arm. What would cause that behavior?? That's happened a couple of times over the year.

[trialnerror]

May be a panel thing; probably not an AD thing. If you have a vista 20p panel and a programming manual, look at fields 59 and 86 which can change panel behavior under different conditions. Perhaps they can explain what you saw?

[Maxburn]

Turns out this is an alarm panel behavior thing, you simply don't know what zone was tripped unless you sit there and wait for the alarm system to go off. If you disarm it before that happens it just goes back to normal with no indication of what happened.

This could be a value add for Alarm Decoder, we know if the system is armed and if then any zone is triggered AD could send an immediate notification. Basically how it behaves if you turn on zone faulted/restored for notifications but only when the system is armed.