Electronic Alarms and Home Security Devices - Ademco Vista 20p occasional beeping

We have an Ademco Vista 20p at a vacant home we are selling. When we get there each morning to set it up for showings, the system is beeping/chiming at the panel, similar to the sound when you enter and need to disarm.

The system is not armed, and all we have to do to silence the system is press the "off" key. It does not recur during the day but is beeping again the next day.

There are no error codes on the panel (other than the FC, because we do not have phone service now for monitoring).

I'm thinking I need to replace the battery, but I don't see the BAT indication at the panel. We do not have any wireless sensors. I didn't want to run off and buy another battery if there is some other condition I need to check.

Also, the current battery is second replacement (third battery) over a 10 year period (a little over 3 years per battery). Is this fairly typical, exceptional performance, or way to short a life? We only have occasional short power outages, though this one was subjected to 6 weeks without AC due to Hurricane Ike about 9 months ago.

Thanks for your advice.

You already answered your own question. FC is failure to communicate. Your phone line is disconnected. The only way to eliminate this to either restore phone lines, or disable the dialer by going into the programming:

[installer code] + 8 + 00
*41*
*42*
*99

Thanks, Mr Ron.

So it is the lack of phone service that causes the occasional beeping that we have to cancel? I was surprised because we have not had phone service on that system for almost a year and it only started this behavior in the last 30 days or less. I couldn't understand why it would go nearly 12 months without complaining (except for the code on the display). But, I know so little about these things except how to arm/disarm.

Let me know if this info causes you to think it may be something else. Otherwise, we'll just live with cancelling it each morning so the new owners (hopefully soon) will have an easier time getting monitoring reestablished.

Thanks!

Basically, something else, (power failure, etc) made the panel try to dial out to report in and it failed to connect. Once it fails, it will keep trying again every 24 hours.

Follow the procedures in the sticky titled "Alarm Forum FAQ (Please read before posting) for jumping the panel into program mode. Once there you can extract the installer code and turn off the dialer, as previously suggested.

(and yes, 3-5 years is par for the course for an alarm battery)

Thanks again, Ron. This satisifies my need to have things in the world make sense to me, in which I am often frustrated. :)

If it gets to be too much of a hassle to just cancel it each morning when we go over there, we'll take those steps to turn off the dialer.

Since we were at or near the typical life of the battery we went ahead and replaced that. Seems to have solved the problem, even though we were not seeing the low battery indicator on the display.

Thanks for all the help!