NetworX – Setting your date and time

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. 

Date and Time loss

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.

SET SYSTEM DATE

Step 1 Press the [*]-[9]-[6].
Step 2 Enter the “Master Code”.
Step 3 Enter the “Day of Week “

1 = Sunday 3 = Tuesday 5 = Thursday 7 = Saturday
2 = Monday 4 = Wednesday 6 = Friday

Step 4 Enter the “Month Code”. Must always be two (2) digits.
01 = January 05 = May 09 = September
02 = February 06 = June 10 = October
03 = March 07 = July 11 = November
04 = April 08 = August 12 = December

Step 5 Enter the “Day Code”. Must always be two (2) digits. Example: The 5th would be entered as [0]–[5].
Step 6 Enter the last two digits of the “Year Code”. Example: For 1997 enter [9]–[7].

SETTING THE SYSTEM CLOCK.

Step 1 Press [*]-[9]-[7].
Step 2 Enter the “Master Code “.
Step 3 Enter the “hour code” which must be two (2) digits. Note: The clock is a 24-hour clock. 
Step 4 Enter the “minutes code” which must be two (2) digits.

Example: 7 minutes after would be entered [0]–[7].