BT VP1000 home monitor - Opinions?

grimsalve

Hello everyone, I'm moving house next week and the place I'm moving to has a BT VP1000 installed. Does anyone have one of these in their house at the moment or any previous experience of them?

It's been fixed to a wall in a cupboard and there's no phone line anywhere near it (the "check" light is on), and even if there was a phone line nearby I'm don't fancy paying BT a fiver a month for the monitoring service. I know it's designed to be a monitoring system rather than a burglar alarm - will I have any problems with it in the future if I never plug it into a phone socket?

I'm a bit wary of these "monitored" systems, a few years back I was in a house that had a British Gas alarm/monitor fitted - that used to make regular calls to an 0870 number and then beeped like mad when I tried to isolate it from the phone line. I ended up having to pay for a British Gas engineer to visit and shut it down (nice little earner for BG!).

Is the VP1000 worth keeping or should I bin it and pay for a "real" alarm?

Also, there's an external siren box (I thought this was a dummy at first) and this makes a loud beep every time the system is armed or disarmed. Is it possible to mute this?