PLease Help - We had a power cut and now burglar alarm is won't work

redmandarin

Please can you wise people give me a bit of advice on this one?

We had three electricity power cuts in our area last week - the last one was on Friday evening and our electricity was off for four hours. When we opened the front door on Saturday morning, the burglar alarm sounded. It does it every time the door is opened and it cannot be activated to work when we leave the house. It was fine before and we think the last power cut has broken it.

Its going to cost a fortune to fix. Can we claim the repair costs from the supplier? And if so how? We're with EDF (but in the process of changing suppliers) but it says nothing about power cuts on their website. Would our contents insurance cover it? It says nothing about this in the contract (it's with More Than) but I expect they'll say its the suppliers fault. Its my birthday tomorrow and Valentine's day the day after and we were hoping to go out and celebrate, but now we can't leave the house empty without the alarm on! :sad:

Any help will be gratefully received - thanks!


Sorry about the typo in the title - it won't let me edit it!

needaspirin

You can ask on this forum. http://www.thesecurityinstaller.co.uk/community/index.php?showforum=140 They are all alarm specialists and may be able to help you to fix/reset your system. I found them a really friendly and helpful bunch.

Cardew

Power cuts do not 'break' burglar alarms. They are designed to work during power cuts by using their internal battery.

There will no doubt be experts on site above who will give you good advice.

However a similar incident happened to me some while ago which was attributed to the battery becoming flat during the power cut, and so old it would not accept a charge. In fact I have since read that U/S batteries are a cause of many burglar alarm faults.

SuiDreams

We had problems last year as the battery died and the alarm started sounding for no reason. In all it cost £100 to fix including call out to see what was wrong and parts (New Alarm box on outside of house). Don't think they were cvery happy with us for taking the fuse out of the alarm but it was the only way we could stop it.

tripled

Neither the supplier not the distributor would reimburse you for the cost of fixing the alarm I'm afraid. It will be in your terms of connection that they can't guarantee a continuous supply.

Whilst I agree that a burglar alarm is a useful security feature to have, isn't refusing to leave the house a little bit overboard?

BlondeHeadOn

I'd second the poster who said it might be a flat battery - we had this with our burgler alarm, and it was a major pain until we found out what the problem was. We changed the battery ourselves, re-set the code etc., and all is now fine again, for the price of a new battery.