Burglar Alarm (MERGED)

Parisien

Guys.....anyone know what you should be paying for twice annual maintenance, plus monitoring, typical costs and names of companies...we just think our current company is shafting us!!

lapat

monitoring can be anything from £5 to £25 a month depending on what exactley you want covering.
i.e basic £5 will enable a phone call to you to say the alarm has gone off a text and speech dialer will do this for you for around £65 plus vat so you do the maths.
£25 will see someone come out and check over your house with a report back to you this is a good feature if you are away from home a lot

as fore twice yearley maintence that is a rip of on its own an alarm should only be looked at once a year maximum an thats generally to do a voltage check on the battery which should last at least two years.

does your alarm have user access or does the engineer need to input the codes to see the log fault feature...?

if they do if you are going to cancel make sure they give you these before you cancel the contract...

also check your small print as a lot of these monitoring companies also charge you a hefty exit fee from there contract as they some say they are leasing you the equipment.....so be carefull

Parisien

Lapat...they are charging me £176 pa a year for maintenace and monitoring, its a hard wired system, had it since 2003, same company.

Any companies you recommend soley for monitoring, ie contacting us etc if it goes of? How often do they go wrong....ie is yearly maintenance really required?

Thanks for the info so far.

IvanOpinion

I really must get my alarm serviced ... nobody has looked at it in 7 years (apart from me dooing an annual test). Since the firm that fitted it is no longer about does anybody know of a good independent person in the Bangor area that could check it out properly

Thanks
Ivan

jim._2

I recently purchased a Yale wireless system for my mum's house for £80 from B&Q. It's a good system for someone on a budget or someone who doesn't want to take their house apart fitting it. It is very basic though as far as functionality goes. After fitting the alarm, the house 2 down with no alarm was burgled - did it do it's job by just having a box on the front of the house?

I fitted my own wired sysytem to my own hose 11 years ago. Veritas panel with 8 PIRs and a door contact, 2 keypads and 1 sounder. Much more functionality, but even 11 years ago the parts cost £200.

Fot those who want on the cheap monitoring, why not buy an auto dialler for your existing system. This can be setup to phone whoever you choose should your alarm go off. I don't have one, but I think they can be set up to try several numbers.

Afaik, the monitoring company get a call from an auto dialer to say say your alarm has gone off and they then ring your house. If they don't get a suitable reply, they phone the police. Worth the money?

lapat

Parisien wrote: »

Lapat...they are charging me £176 pa a year for maintenace and monitoring, its a hard wired system, had it since 2003, same company.

Any companies you recommend soley for monitoring, ie contacting us etc if it goes of? How often do they go wrong....ie is yearly maintenance really required?

Thanks for the info so far.

me personally i wouldnt have the monitoring as the technology is out there for a small upgrade fee to do what your company charges you to monitor the house.

do you know what your panel is your keypad will usually indicate this. ie veritas/ade etc this will then give you an indication if you can have a text and speech dialer.my dialer cost £80 and it will send 6 texts
(and 4 different alerts i.e intruder/fire/system tamper etc) and ring four different numbers.(i just use the text as it sends it within 3 seconds of the alarm going off) the dialer i have also has a ring back and listen in facility. and theres four wires plus your telephone connection and if you can right a text then you can program the dialer. but by the sound of it there is allready a dialer box installed if it contacts your monitoring comapny so its just a matter of changing the number inside the dialer.

as for your maintenance/monitor contract no there is none i would recomend. they all charge to much.

yearley maintenance can be done by yourself if your box was installed in 2003 then i would suggest that its pretty much component/service free i.e if it goes the whole box will need replacing(cost of a top box around £80). the only component that requires changing is the internal battery. around £15 max and simpler than changing a light bulb and i would recomend a two year change on battery as they are getting better all the time.

also as i said before check your small print as most monitoring companys do charge an exit fee and its usually quite a bit and as far as im aware there is no timescale on when you dont hqave to pay this fee

lapat

just one other thing about monitoring an alarm installer i knew used to make a fortune out of monitoring he used to charge £7.99 a month and he would install a text dialer in the persons house who he had fitted the alarm for and he would program the dialer with the persons name and telephone numbers.
so when the alarm went of he recieve the text and then phone the householder in question and inform them that there alarm was going off.(the police didnt respond to house alarms in his part of the world)......he was a mobile installer.no office no computer system nothing so you can see the technology is out there and he had a few customers with monitoring and alarm calls were very minimal.

not a bad money earner aye and it was all above board i just didnt like they way he earnt his money...

dmxdave

lapat wrote: »

(the police didnt respond to house alarms in his part of the world)

Long gone are the days when dialers rang 999 ! (They were based on an 8 track type system) showing my age here :rotfl:

You are 100% on the ripoffs! as you say a battery in the panel, give the pir's a dust and away you go, just one word of warning. The outdoor bell boxes also have a back up battery (goes off if the wire is cut) which will need replaced at some stage, again it's an easy process the things to watch are the screws holding the cover on may be rusted and the main bit is access to it as working from a ladder you should always maintain 3 points of contact with the ladder (2 feet 1 hand or 2 hands 1 foot) which makes it difficult so be carefull! Try to tie it in with some other work which would need scaffolding etc.

Just remembered another point! some alarm panels have service lights which are programmed by the installer to come on at whatever frequency they want!

jim._2

lapat wrote: »

i would recomend a two year change on battery as they are getting better all the time.

Yes, any time the electric goes off in my area, there must be at least 3-4 alarms that start going off almost instantly. Obviously dodgy backup batteries (or maybe none at all?), but I doubt the owners know what the problem is.

However, mine has never done this and it is the original battery - 11 years old.

dmxdave

jim. wrote: »

Yes, any time the electric goes off in my area, there must be at least 3-4 alarms that start going off almost instantly. Obviously dodgy backup batteries

OR the installer has programmed them to show a fault when the power goes off which can result in a call out!

Again this can be changed if you have the engineer code & instructions.