Zone Types and What Each One Does When Tripped

Why this matters

Most "it went off when I walked in" calls and most "it never went off" complaints are not sensor faults. They are a zone programmed as the wrong type. A front door set to instant sends a dispatch the moment the owner comes home, a hallway motion set to instant does the same six seconds later, and a flood sensor put on a burglary type sends police to a wet basement while the house is armed and does nothing at all while it is disarmed. The sensor reports a fault; the zone type decides what that fault means, and the answer changes with the arm state.

A zone is a rule, not a wire

Every zone has three layers, and techs who blur them program badly:

• The input: a hardwired loop or an enrolled wireless sensor. The wiring tells the panel normal, open or short (see related: End-of-Line Resistor Supervision: Open, Short and Normal). It says nothing about what to do.
• The type: the instruction for what a fault means in each arm state. That is this card.
• The attributes: chime, bypassable or not, which report code goes to the central station, swinger shutdown, cross-zoning. Several of those are false-alarm features that belong to False Alarm Reduction Features in the SIA CP-01 Standard.

Panels name types by number in their programming guides, and the numbers are not shared across makers. A type 03 on one panel is not a type 03 on another. Write your zone sheet in function names, then translate to the panel's numbers from its own documentation. A takeover sheet that says only "type 10" is a puzzle for the next tech.

The sheet, filled in

A two-story house with a hybrid panel, ten zones, two keypads (front hall and garage entry). "Away", "Stay" and "Off" are the three arm states; the cell says what a fault does in that state.

ZONE SHEET  12 ALDER CT        PANEL: HYBRID, 10 ZONES
ZN LOCATION          TYPE            AWAY   STAY   OFF
01 Front door        Entry/exit 1    delay  delay  chime
02 Garage entry dr   Entry/exit 2    delay  delay  chime
03 Living rm windows Perimeter inst  alarm  alarm  chime
04 Kitchen slider    Perimeter inst  alarm  alarm  chime
05 Hall motion       Interior follow follow bypass ---
06 Family rm motion  Interior follow follow bypass ---
07 Keypad panic      24-hr audible   alarm  alarm  alarm
08 Upstairs smoke    Fire 24-hr      fire   fire   fire
09 Basement flood    24-hr non-burg  notify notify notify
10 Back door         Entry/exit 1    delay  delay  chime
ENTRY 1 = 30 s   ENTRY 2 = 45 s   EXIT = 60 s

The delay times are this shop's settings, inside the ranges SIA CP-01 sets for panels listed to it; how to choose and time them belongs to How to Program Entry and Exit Delays and Time Them.

Entry/exit: why the front door gets a delay

A door the owner uses to come and go has to fault without an alarm, because the keypad is on the inside. An entry/exit zone starts the entry delay when it faults while armed: the keypad beeps, and the panel waits for a valid code before calling it an alarm. On arming, the same zone may fault freely until the exit delay expires.

The front door (01) and back door (10) share Entry 1 at 30 seconds because each sits a few steps from a keypad. The garage entry door (02) gets its own Entry 2 at 45 seconds because the owner is coming out of a car with bags and a phone, and the garage keypad is on the far wall. Panels with two entry timers exist for exactly this; giving every door the longest delay hands an intruder through the front door the garage's 45 seconds for nothing.

A door that is never used to come and go (a basement walkout the family keeps barred) is not an entry zone just because it is a door. Program it perimeter instant and tell the customer it will not give them time.

Perimeter instant: the windows and the doors nobody walks through

Perimeter instant alarms the moment it faults in Away or Stay. Windows (03) and the kitchen slider (04) are here because nobody legitimately enters through them while the system is armed. Stay mode keeps them armed because the point of Stay is a protected shell around people who are moving around inside it.

The slider deserves a note. If the family uses it to let the dog out at night, it is an entry/exit zone, not perimeter instant, and the conversation about it happens at the zone sheet, not after the first dispatch.

Interior follower: why the hallway motion follows

This is the type that matters most and is misprogrammed most. An interior follower behaves as instant UNLESS an entry delay is already running, in which case it waits out that delay too. In Stay it is automatically bypassed.

Follow the owner's path at 12 Alder Ct: front door, then the hall, then the keypad. The hall motion (05) sees them a few seconds after the door opens. Program it instant and it alarms mid-hall. Program it entry delay and it works for the owner, but now an intruder who comes in through a window you did not contact (the upstairs bath, say) and walks the hall gets 30 seconds free. The follower gives the owner the delay their door started and gives an intruder who started no delay nothing.

Plain interior instant has a place (a room no entry path crosses, like a detached office reached only from outside), but on a motion that sits on the entry path it is a false alarm with a schedule.

The 24-hour family: armed whether or not anyone armed it

Zones 07, 08 and 09 ignore the arm state entirely, but they do different things:

• 24-hour audible / silent panic (07). Trips the siren (audible) or reports silently (hold-up) in every state. Silent is for a customer who would rather not escalate an intruder already inside; audible is for "help, now". Ask which they want, and note it on the sheet.
• Fire 24-hour (08). Reports as fire, sounds the fire pattern rather than the burglary sound, and routes to the fire department. On many panels it cannot be bypassed. Smoke and CO on a combination panel bring NFPA 72 in the edition your jurisdiction has adopted, and often a separate license; see related: Combination Fire and Burglary Panels and the License Line, and What a Fire Alarm Panel Is Actually Doing.
• 24-hour non-burglary (09). The environmental type for flood, freeze and temperature sensors. It sounds the keypad, not the burglary siren, and reports a non-burglary event that the central station handles by calling the customer's contact list rather than police. Program a flood sensor as a burglary type and it dispatches police when armed and is ignored when disarmed, which is exactly backwards.

Tamper on enclosures and covers usually rides on its own 24-hour or supervisory type too, so opening a siren box or the panel can is reported in every state.

Three trips at 12 Alder Ct, followed through

Owner returns, armed Away, 6:02:00 pm. Front door 01 faults. Entry delay 1 starts, 30 seconds. At 6:02:06 hall motion 05 faults: follower, delay running, so it waits. At 6:02:19 the owner enters the code. No alarm; 19 of the 30 seconds used. Now change one input at a time:

• Hall motion 05 programmed interior instant: alarm at 6:02:06, six seconds after the door opened, and the central station gets a burglary from the hall. It is one of the commonest new-install dispatches.
• Front door 01 programmed perimeter instant: alarm at 6:02:00 the moment the door moves.
• Entry 1 shortened to 15 seconds to "tighten security" (on a panel that allows it; CP-01 sets the floor for panels listed to it): the code at 6:02:19 lands 4 seconds late and the panel has already called it.

Intruder, armed Away, 2:40 am. The slider glass is broken out and the intruder steps through without sliding the door, so contact 04 never faults (that gap is what a glass-break detector is for; see related: Glass-Break Detectors: Placement, Range and Testing). Family room motion 06 faults. Follower, no entry delay running, so it alarms instantly. Had 06 been programmed entry delay, the panel would have given the intruder 30 seconds and the first siren would have sounded after they were well into the house.

Teenager, armed Stay, 11:15 pm. Hall and family room motions are bypassed, so walking around is fine. The back door 10 opens to let the dog out: entry delay 1 starts and the keypad beeps for 30 seconds. If the customer arms "Night" or "Instant" (a Stay variant on many panels that removes the entry delay), that same door alarms instantly. Explain the difference at training, not at the first dispatch.

Disarmed, 3:00 pm, basement flood. Zone 09 sounds the keypad, the panel reports a non-burglary event, and the central station calls the contact list. Nobody is dispatched, which is correct.

How to verify the sheet matches the panel

Before you leave a job, every zone has been tested in the arm state that exercises its type, with the account on test at the central station first (see related: How to Put an Alarm Account on Test and Take It Off):

• Entry/exit: arm Away, wait out the exit delay, open the door, time the delay against the sheet before disarming.
• Followers: arm Away, wait out exit, then trip the motion WITHOUT opening a door. It must alarm at once. Then open the entry door, walk past the motion, and disarm inside the delay. It must not.
• Perimeter instant: in Stay, open a window. Instant alarm.
• Stay bypass: in Stay, walk past each interior motion. Silence.
• 24-hour: disarmed, trip the panic, the flood sensor and (where you are licensed to touch it) the smoke test. Each must report with the correct event type, not a burglary.

Then confirm the central station received each zone with the right zone number and event code before taking the account off test; see related: How to Walk Test Every Zone with the Central Station. A zone that tests right at the keypad and arrives as the wrong zone at the station is half-programmed.

The failure to look for is a sheet nobody updates. A customer adds a dog door, the tech moves the slider to entry/exit at the keypad, and the paper sheet still says perimeter instant. The next tech reprograms from the paper. Update the sheet and the account record in the same visit as the change.

References

• ANSI/SIA CP-01, Control Panel Standard: False Alarm Reduction (binds panels listed to it; delay ranges and defaults per the current edition)
• NFPA 72, National Fire Alarm and Signaling Code, in the edition adopted by your jurisdiction
• Panel manufacturer's programming guide (zone type numbers and behavior)
• See related: Security + Alarm Systems Reference; End-of-Line Resistor Supervision: Open, Short and Normal; How to Program Entry and Exit Delays and Time Them