Setting time and date on a DSC NEO

It is very important to make sure that your alarm systems date and time is correct. The date and time reflects on the internal logs of the system, and it helps investigators and engineers to identify when a system was armed or disarmed or at what time the system has gone into an alarm condition. Without the correct time on the system, insurance investigators might have issues confirming if your system was armed during a burglary and might reject your claim, and Engineers can not properly troubleshoot from the event log. If communications of the systems are compromised, these logs also serves as a backup of sequence of events. 

Why Systems loose their time

So why does the systems loose their date and time, or why do the time drifts over a period of time?

The time and date is usually lost after a prolonged power failure when the system internal backup battery goes below 10.5Vdc, and the systems then switches off to protect the battery from being damaged, by draining the battery voltage to low. On power restoral, the system will switch back on, with an error condition on the keypad (The yellow/orange) triangle will burn. If you have a LCD full text keypad for your system, you will also notice that the date and time of the system is blank on power up, and that your yellow trouble light of the system is lit. If you use your trouble condition command to investigate further the system will give you a date and time error as part of its trouble condition. By re-setting the date and time, the error condition will disappear, provided that your battery has also started to re-charge. (You might have more than one error condition)

Another scenario is that the time drifts and is out by 30 minutes or an hour over a period of days or months. The last scenario is normally caused by mains supply that is not the correct frequency or by generators that does not supply the correct 50/60Hz to the panel. There are other options to deal with these matters. The most popular option on modern systems is to use a NTP time server to auto update the time over a period of 24 hours, but be warned not all panels can offer this as a solution.

Setting the date and the time

For home owners that would like to avoid the costly call out fee to set the panels date and time below. To set the date and time of an alarm system press the following from your keypad:

Use this section to program the alarm system clock.
Menu: [*][6][Master Code] > Time and Date
Keypad: [*][6][Master Code] + 01

Enter time and date using the following format: (HH:MM); (MM-DD-YY). Valid time entries are 00-23 hours, 00-59 minutes. Valid date entries are 01-12 months, 01-31 days.

• [*][6][1][2][3][4] [1]  [H][H][M][M]    [m][m][d][d][y][y]  [#][#] – The [ ] represents a button push. 
• *6 is the system command
• 1234 is the default master code of the system, and might have been changed by the installer.
• 1 is the date and time submenu or scroll use the arrow keys to Time and Date and press the star button to select the option.
• HHMM is the time in a 24 hour format.
• mmddyy is the date in the format month day year. It is a two digit month number followed by a two digit day number followed by a two digit year number.
• ## is to exit the programming sections.
• Example : Program the system date 19/07/2021 on the 31 June 2021@ 21:15 

*6 1234 1 2115 063121 ## – Setting the date and time with a full text LCD keypad is a lot easier than using LED keypads.
Note: On LCD keypads you use your arrow keys to scroll.