Electronic Alarms and Home Security Devices - Ademco 20P....short????

I bought the 20P and had it installed by a professional.....my house was prewired, so it was a pretty simple job for them. Everything has been working fine for the past couple weeks, but now I am getting a fault in zone 4. Zone 4 has 4 windows in it.

I've opened/closed all of them, looked for loose magnets...etc. Then I took my electrical tester to the wired sensors on those and a couple other wired windows. The other zone windows (2) do not detect any voltage/current. On zone 4 I have one window that is setting off the meter while the others are silent.

Do I have a short somewhere? Possibly in the control panel?

I'm not sure if any of you have experienced this problem, but would sure like a suggestion or 2 on what's going on.

Thanks for your help, and that in the past.

Great forum for those of us that are just beginning to tinker in these systems.

why the hell they doubled 4 windows in the same zone .vista 20 could take 15 zone with the zone doublibg feature in it.anyway,if they double the windows than any open one will cause to show zone 4 is open, and this why they should have used another method indoing so. the best way to troubleshhot this is to go into the panel and try each windows a time by itself on the panel ,or take off the wires from the contacts and short the yellow and green or whatever colors they have used ,this way you will know which one is short.

Unless it's an unusual setup, you don't have a short, you have an opening that's not making continuity. The easiest way to find the problem if you have a multimeter, and know how to test continuity, is to take the zone wires off of the panel terminals and check each pair for continuity. The one that tests as open, is the window you need to check. It may be a bad contact (even new ones sometimes fail early), or something as simple as a bad connector, or a wire that broke where it's attached to the window contact (heck, a magnet could simply have fallen off).

If you find that all of you wires are in order and there is nothing wrong with the contacts then you may have to default the panel and reprogram it.

Just two weeks ago I had a brand new Vista-20P that I had to do this with. I did the install and all zones were working fine for a couple of months then all of a sudden zones 2 and 4 would fault. These zones had only one door each wired to them. I put the doors on another zone and the doors worked fine so I knew the problem was in the zone itself. I then checked the probramming of the two zones and this was correct. I called tech support and they suggested defaulting the panel by exiting programming with *97 and reprogramming the panel. I did this and and zones 2 and 4 are working fine.