Found the hidden bundle of wires – what’s the most efficient way to add these to my system?

TL;DR should I use a wired to wireless product to get my wired sensors into my existing 433 MHZ system, or junk the wireless one and get something new? Or am I missing a better way to get this done?

Thanks to all who replied to my post yesterday looking for help locating a missing panel rough-in. As much as I wanted to go buy a top of the line Fox and Hound sniffer I decided to make one more attempt to find the wire bundle. I took a close look at the wires connected to my existing unused window sensors, and there was enough slack that I was able to identify it as Genesis 22/4. I went up to the attic and dug around in insulation until I found a strand of the same wire, and followed it away from the window. It joined a bundle of others, eventually dropping down a wall that I was able to locate. It ended up being in the guest bedroom closet, which had an outlet in it sort of tucked back to the side that I missed in my initial search. Could have saved myself a crawl. Above it was a cover (with a couple decades of paint hiding it) that allowed access to the wall cavity and a huge bundle of wires that have never been used.

Previous owners ignored all of the perfect pre-wire and had ADT put in a DSC Impassa SCW9057-433 with wireless sensors that covered all exterior doors, motion on ground floor, and about 10% of the windows. I’m using these sensors and the 4 motion detectors in my home automation setup by monitoring the 433 MHz band with an rtl_SDR radio. I have the following objectives in my expansion:

  1. Add the existing wired sensors to my home automation setup (primary objective).
  2. Add these to my home security system either as individual devices or add them in series as zones – If I set up each one individually it will end up using almost all of the 64 zones, so I think I should put multiple windows from the same room in series.

Other considerations – the existing Impassa is downstairs by the garage entry door, good location for the keypad but the other wires all terminate upstairs. I’m pretty sure there’s comm wire from there to the closet ( I see one ethernet up there) but it would be fairly easy to fish if not as there’s a chaseway. My Home automation speaks 433 MhZ, Z-Wave, Zigby, and is wired ethernet to 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz wifi.

Seems like my options so far are:

  1. Add one or more wireless translators to the closet to turn these wired into wireless so I can add them to the Impasta. Obstacles are cost and scale, as the 433 MHz translator I found so far hold only 4 or 8 zones, I would need multiple. There are larger ones but they use a different frequency and I would lose the primary objective of home automation connection.
  2. Junk the Impasta and choose a wired system that can communicate with my home automation systems.

Is there a better way to do this? Any product recommendations are appreciated.

submitted by /u/Suprflyyy
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January 31, 2023
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