Security alarm system

andy2012

I am an electrician / Alarm technician and I did an electrical job for a customer 3 years ago fine and at the time he says he was getting messed about with his alarm company and was going to cancel his maintenance contract with them .
I reminded him that to inform his insurance company as no doubt he would get a discount so all good he stops paying the alarm company £150 per annum and pays £20 extra on his house insurance as he no longer claims the discount happy days.

Today he asks me to replace a door contact not a big job but when this is done the control panel requests an "Engineer Reset" or in other words We have the Engineers code and we will not give it out so if you want your alarm reset this will be £120+vat.

Now my understanding is that this is not legal as the customer owns the security system outright and when he cancelled hi maintenance contract they should have removed this function as they should not have set it up this way.

Now I live in Scotland so can anybody shed light on this please for me the customer is paying this under protest and I have told him to instruct them to remove this function as it is not required and should never have been put in , in the first place.

Also this is a heads up for anyone who is thinking of doing the same

pinkshoes

So the alarm system this guy has was installed by some company who he used to pay £150/year maintenance with, but decided to stop using them for maintenance, and just keep the alarm system.

He's now discovered that if he wants to change anything within the alarm system 'loop', he has to pay £120+vat for an engineer reset, which only this original company can do?

(so instead of paying £150/year, he's paying the same per thing he has to change????)

Would it have been free if he was still paying the maintenance charge?

terra_ferma

What does the contract say? If they put it in the contract maybe he'll have to pay.

Darksun

As far as I know it's perfectly legal, plenty of alarm companies do it. In corporate contracts there's usually a written agreement about what happens regarding codes/passwords at the end of the maintenance agreement, so see what his contract says.

Just crash the panel, surely if it's a domestic system it won 't take more than an hour or two to reprogramme, unless your hourly rate is more than £60 the customer will be saving money. Although before you do that just try the factory default code, it's worrying how many companies don't change it

andy2012

Just to add the system was bought and paid for but the customer took on the maintenance contract but years later felt it was a waste of time and money as if he had to call them out for anything there was a further charge. Plus the panel was overated for a domestic premises. Thing is 3 years later only to find out that they have set the system for engineer reset on things like a tamper alarm so you may take the front cover off a movement sensor to decorate and then get hit with a callout .

As for legal ......... Well I would have thought Trading Standards would say you cannot hold someone to ransom by configuring their system not yours for Engineer reset

andy2012

pinkshoes wrote: »

So the alarm system this guy has was installed by some company who he used to pay £150/year maintenance with, but decided to stop using them for maintenance, and just keep the alarm system.

He's now discovered that if he wants to change anything within the alarm system 'loop', he has to pay £120+vat for an engineer reset, which only this original company can do?

(so instead of paying £150/year, he's paying the same per thing he has to change????)

Would it have been free if he was still paying the maintenance charge?

No the customer owned the system a bit like your central heating system you own it but pay British Gas to maintain it

bod1467

andy2012 wrote: »

No the customer owned the system a bit like your central heating system you own it but pay British Gas to maintain it

And BG don't hold you to ransom for changing the heating time settings. (Which is analogous to resetting an alarm system).

Darksun

bod1467 wrote: »

And BG don't hold you to ransom for changing the heating time settings. (Which is analogous to resetting an alarm system).

No one is being held to ransom. The customer is quite free to reset the alarm or themselves, or get another company to do so. It just means resetting the system back to factory settings and losing the programming

mountainofdebt

Is it an ADT alarm?

I'm only asking as we recently had an issue with our ADT alarm and got the local guy out instead of ADT as they wanted an arm and a leg just to even walk through the door ......and yes we didn't have a maintenance agreement with them either.

When the guy had finished it also asked for an engineer's code and we simply put in our code and everything was sorted.