How Many Hardwired Zones Are Available on the Honeywell Vista 20P Control Panel?

Honeywell Vista 20P control panel offers versatility and a wide variety of features that make it ideal for homes as well as small commercial buildings such as small offices or storefronts. With cellular communicator compatibility, the 20P supports up to 48 zones and 2 partitions. You can outfit it with a wide range of Honeywell devices such as alarm keypads, alarm sounders, wireless receivers, etc. that allow users to customize the Vista 20P according to their preferences.

Hardwired Zones of Vista 20P

Honeywell Vista 20P control panel has the capacity for 8 on-board zones. You can use basic connections to connect them.

Zone Doubling

Vista 20P control panel supports an optional connection scheme known as Zone Doubling. It adds 7 more hardwired zones to Vista 20P. The best thing about it is that you don’t need any additional hardware to add these zones. However, the hookup arrangement for zone doubling is a bit advanced and complex.

Zones 1-8

As mentioned before, there is a support for 8 on-board zones in Honeywell Vista 20P control panel. Each of these 8 zones uses a 2,000-ohm end-of-line resistor. You can locate this resistor inside the panel or at the alarm contact.

The terminals 8(+) and 9(-) of Zone 1 can be used for 2-wire smoke detectors. So you can use them to add fire protection to the control panel without any extra equipment or modules, apart from the smoke detectors themselves.

2-Wire Smoke Detectors

With Zone 1, you can use up to (16) 2-wire smoke detectors. Up to 10 of them can be used for ESL detectors. You will need to enable the ‘clean me’ option to use these. If you want to make sure that the detectors are compatible, then it is recommended that you check the detector specifications.

You can place the end-of-line resistor across the terminals if you are installing any 2-wire smokes. This will provide a supervision alert from the keypads if a fire wire is damaged.

4-Wire Smoke Detectors

Support for 4-wire smoke alarms is possible with Vista 20P control panel. You will need to add a relay to enable this support. The relay will also allow the 20P to switch off power to the smokes if you use the ‘smoke detector reset’ command.

Zones 2-8

Zones 2-8 are standard burglary zones. Both zones 1 and 2 have dedicated terminals for Hi (+) and Lo (-) sides of the loops. The Lo sides are shared by zones 3-8 in pairs. This connection scheme is quite common in alarm panel design and is known as a ‘common negative’ connection scheme. This scheme is mainly used to simplify the overall layout of the Vista 20P control panel. It also saves space.

Zone Expanders

If you would like to use up to 48 wired zones with Honeywell Vista 20P control panel, then you can achieve this by using a compatible hardwired zone expander from Honeywell, for example the Honeywell 4219.