Syncro Panel power connection

The Syncro range of control panels have been designed and certified to EN54-2 and EN54-4 requirements, including the Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) requirements of these standards.

In order ensure that the products are correctly protected against the possible influence of external electromagnetic interference, it is essential that the panel is correctly installed in accordance with the instructions given in the product manual.

The Syncro panels are fitted with a large ferrite bead in the upper right corner of the panel enclosure. The mains feed to the Syncro panel should be passed through this bead, round the outside then back through the bead (1 full turn) before being connected to the power supply mains terminals.



Once terminated into the power supply, the cables should also be held together using a small cable tie. This is designed to ensure that the cables will be held in position in the mains input block, even if one of the termination screws is not fully tightened – thus reducing the risk of injury to users or damage to the product.

The purpose of the ferrite bead is to add additional low pass filtering to the mains connection. This has two significant advantages

1. It reduces the amount of high frequency noise generated by the switch mode power supply that is emitted from the panel onto the mains cables

2. It increases the immunity of the panel to power spikes / glitches from external sources on the mains input to the panel

The latter is particularly important. If the Syncro panel is not adequately protected against the effect of power spikes or high frequency induced noise, there an increased possibility that the panel microprocessor could intermittently be restarted and produce a “watchdog fault - processor restarted” system fault.

In order to ensure a reliable, fault tolerant system, please ensure that all the manufacturers installation instructions are closely followed.

Note: The Syncro AS panel does not have a ferrite bead installed and therefore the mains cables are directly connected to the mains terminal block.

To download a copy of the Syncro Manual:

Syncro AS Panel – Daylight Saving Adjustment Issue

The Syncro AS panel fundamentally has the same features and menu options as the Syncro panel, from which it evolved.

However, one variation on the Syncro AS panel is the facility to automatically amend the panel clock twice per year, for Daylight Saving time adjustment. These Syncro AS panels, if connected onto a Syncro network, would also send their revised time information to all other panels and synchronise all panels to the revised time.

During the spring of 2008, it was found that some Syncro AS panels that were not connected to a Syncro network (and didn’t have a S555 network card installed) would re-initialise and report a system fault (CPU fault) after the time change instruction was processed.

A revision to the panel firmware to ensure that the panel would not re-initialise during the time change was introduced in panel firmware V5.23 – released in mid- 2008.

Some customers updated their panels firmware to V5.23, others switched off the DST option in the Access Level 2 “Set Time” menu.

It has been brought to our attention that there are still some stand alone Syncro AS panels which have the DST option selected and use firmware prior to V5.23, which are still vulnerable to this problem.
If you are maintaining any such Syncro AS panels, it is recommended that the panels are either updated to V5.23 or later firmware or the DST option switched off in the panel clock settings.

To download the current Syncro AS firmware (Hochiki and Apollo protocol) V5.244:

To download the current Syncro AS firmware (Argus Vega protocol) V5.25: