Low Voltage Cover – Mounting a 1-Gang Alarm Panel Over 2-Gang Hole

coverlow-voltage

I am replacing a (discontinued) Leviton/HAI OmniPro II Home Automation system with a new Elk M1 Gold system.

The OmniPro II keypads (model 33A00-1) are designed to be mounted either directly on the wall, on top of a single-gang electrical box, or on top of a 2-gang box. In this building, the original installer elected to install using a 2-gang low-voltage ring.

For the new Elk M1 system, the keypads I have are model M1KPNAV (touchscreen) which are designed to mount either directly on the wall or on a single-gang box that is horizontal. The entire new keypad unit is only the size of a single-gang wallplate, so it won't even cover the 2-gang hole.

I really don't want to have to deal with drywall and paint matching – this project is difficult enough without all that. Also, there's a lot of alarm wire in the walls around the panels and I kind-of like being able to take the alarm panel off the wall to be able to reach it.

I know I could just cover the existing hole with a blank faceplate and drill a new hole, but I expect that will look really bad (and won't be approved by other stakeholders).

One thought I had is illustrated in the image below. I should be able to take a regular blank 2-gang faceplate, drill some holes in it, and mount the keypad on top of it.

option

The problem, as you can see, is that the holes to mount the coverplate on the wall are partially covered by the keypad base. This means I would have to first mount the coverplate on the wall and then the keypad on the coverplate. Since the coverplate isn't that thick, I wanted to be able to mount the keypad base onto the coverplate first using nuts behind the coverplate and then mount the whole thing on the wall together.

Does anyone have any other ideas for how I can mount these keypads?

Best Answer

Well, it seems unlikely to be easily solved with a 2-1 gang reducer, or at least I've not met one that also turns the single gang 90 degrees. With a 4 or 4-11/16 square box you just use a one-gang and it could be mounted either way, but that's not what you have.

Three options:

  1. Hot-glue (or epoxy) the nuts to the back of the faceplate.
  2. Place the alarm panel slightly above or below center so that you can drill holes in the alarm back to access one set of mounting screws through it, and access the other set directly above or below the alarm panel.
  3. If the LV ring is square, (they are pretty close to square, but sometimes just a bit off) unscrew, remove, rotate, screw in, and then use a 2-gang to 1 gang "centering" trim plate, which are commonly available.
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