I want to disable sound from alarm touchpad

[BlueHouse]

I have an alarm with two touchpads (one upstairs and one downstairs).  The downstairs touchpad is located directly next to an exterior door and right at ear level, so if I have the alarm chime on, every time I enter/exit, I have a high-pitched, deafening sound in my ear.  It literally hurts for hours afterwards if I go in/out a few times in a row.

I can program the chime on or off, but I would like the chime to stay on so that I can hear if the door opens while I'm upstairs.  The upstairs touchpad is loud enough that I can hear it anywhere in the house -- so I just want to either disable the sound on the downstairs unit or muffle it enough that it doesn't harm my hearing. 

If there were a speaker, I would just tape over it and be done with it, but the sound comes from the entire unit. There is nothing that looks like a speaker.  I've tried to see if I can put a pillow up against one side of it to see if I could lower the volume and pitch just a little, but the only thing that works is a pillow over the entire thing -- and that defeats the purpose of having a touchpad there. 

Any ideas on how to either reduce the volume or disable sound completely from ONE of my touchpads? 

[sokoloff]

It's probably a piezo element that's working as the "speaker".

Might look something like this:

or this:


If you want to take a snap of the keypad unit PCB with the cover off, it will probably be easy for someone to pick out what the sounding element is. From there, you could snip one of the leads (or there may be a jumper on the PCB) or muffle the sound.

If it doesn't look like that, find something that might look like a "vent" to let the sound out. There's physics involved. Sound is an air pressure wave, and there's got to be a hole for it to get out of the keypad and into the free air.

[Spork]

My (very limited) experience with this from my parents' house is: Every stinking sub model of every brand is a little bit different.  You're going to have to google your specific model.  If you subscribe to an alarm monitoring company that does alarm installs, they likely know models inside and out and can tell you oddball key combinations that are not even documented in the manual.  I forget exactly what oddball thing I was trying to do to my parents' system, but "call the alarm company" ended up being the solution.  Even then, they had me try 3 or 4 different things.  I could tell they were reading from some sort of procedure/recipe book for various models.

[BlueHouse]

photo.  I think I see it.  Can I just drop glue on the big donut or tape over it?

[BlueHouse]

Success!  I just put a piece of packing tape over the donut-looking speaker thingy. 

It's still completely audible, but at least now I won't damage my eardrum when I'm directly next to it! 

Thank you guys!  (And only one call from the monitoring service because I pushed the panic alarm by accident)

[HipGnosis]

Great job!
I would suggest you think twice about putting permanent glue on it.  Someday you will sell the house, and a potential buyer might want the loud alarm.  You should tell or show them the tape.

[BlueHouse]

Great job!
I would suggest you think twice about putting permanent glue on it.  Someday you will sell the house, and a potential buyer might want the loud alarm.  You should tell or show them the tape.

Good Idea!  I'll put a note into my house documents (the ones that stay with the house when I leave). cuz I'm sure I'll forget otherwise.