HELP - Yale wireless alarm faulty and costing me a fortune!

samandflorrie

We have a Yale wireless alarm system. We have had it for 2 and a half years. It has had 2 false alarms in that period of time until now.

There were strange beep noises when we armed the system on the outside, happening for a few days and realised we needed new batteries, we had purchased them and were going to fit them when we got back this evening. Only to find that today the alarm going off, we knew it must have been a false alarm as it was lunch time and we had only left about an hour ago. We called the neighbour to ask them to check around the house to see if there was a break in and there wasn't, and we thought the alarm would stop with the siren before we had managed to get back so there was no point in driving another hour back to turn it off as it would have gone off by then anyway. At this point we did not realise we could remote access and turn off the alarm either (we looked this up once we got back to the house). The alarm system kept calling both our mobiles, but in the booklet it states that it calls all numbers 5 times unless we switch it off, and the message it plays is so unclear that it is not possible to decipher what it is saying about acknowledging it pressing 9 to stop the calls (again we looked this up when we got back). If it had just gone off and that was it, it would not be an issue. Instead it let off false alarm after false alarm all day, but we had turned our phones on silent after the first one as it would keep calling us and we were at a friends house for my birthday party but we didn't think we had anything to worry about as the neighbour had checked the house. At 5 pm, on our way back we realised we had both had over 84 missed calls from the alarm system!! that is over 150 calls to our mobile phones from our landline AND the alarm had been on and off all day long!!!! we expected that there would be 5 calls to each of our mobiles and that the siren should have just gone quiet.

This is appalling and obviously faulty, and we are not going to be able to pay our phone bill through no fault of our own. We have no pets and, there were not downstairs windows open, doors were closed and we have no pets. We have had very little problems in the past with the alarm, has anyone else had similar issues????? :mad:

27col

It seems to me that alarm systems that call you when you are miles away are a complete waste of money. Even if you did actually have an intruder, by the time that you had done anything about it, the intruder would have been long gone.

victor2

I believe that by law, an alarm must have a cut-out device that stops it after 20 minutes of continuous sounding. You should also have keyholders registered with the police who can give access to the property. It may well be that your alarm does that, but has an automatic reset to re-arm itself after the cut-off. They're not supposed to do this, but many may by default. So, it sounds like the failing batteries were causing the alarm to trigger and phone you. Then it was resetting itself and going off again, starting a new set of calls.
If all you've got is a big phone bill, consider yourself lucky that an annoyed neighbour didn't report it to the police and they took more drastic action to silence it!

phill99

Lee, you keep going this and you have been reported for spam.