Residential /Commercial Alarm Systems BURGLARY and FIRE DETECTION SMOKE DETECTION GAS/FUME ALARMS
Here are some guidelines that will help you design an effective alarm system with minimal cost and maximum protetion!
Serving all of Hampton Roads since 1972
Locally owned and operated!
Locally owned and operated!
The real facts about buying a burglar alarm system.
By: Bill Agreste, President Vulcan Security Systems, Inc.
I designed my first alarm system back in 1974. Back then we had very little in the form of technology and catching or derailing a burglary was --- well it was an art form. Using wires, switches, and expensive photo cells to detect a break in a light path (as a burglar walked thru the pathway) was the essence of how alarm systems were built back then. We didn't have high energy marketing specialists designing security. No! Alarm designers were actually highly technical and skilled experts that could just as easily install the alarm ... or design it. And our planning wasn't based on creating vast numbers of clients and building large sums of recurring revenue (from overpriced monitoring fees). Our systems were planned around outsmarting the burglar. Basically, we had to design in anticipation of a burglars actions at a particular facility, home or business. By: Bill Agreste, President Vulcan Security Systems, Inc.
It's much different today! Now alarms are designed in corporate offices, they are sold by narrowcast sales people that know little about system planning and whose only experiences comes from the boiler plate sales training rooms of the largest so called alarm companies nationwide. It wouldn't be untrue to say the alarm sales person (called a security designer or security expert) knows little more than you do about burglary and robbery criminal logic and are ill prepared to design a truly effective system.
This is a guideline that will help you find the best possible system design and at the best possible price and with the best possible monitoring service to summon the Police Fire or Rescue authorities when you need it the most.
This guideline is not meant to replace the expertise of a real alarm designer and should not be considered the sole pathway to an effective system. In fact, it is impossible to cover all scenarios in this short form guide so see the advice of a true professional before selecting a final design for your home or business.
What are you trying to protect against?
1. Decide if you are wanting protection from burglary and other break-in type crimes or if you want expanded protection that might include pre-warning alarms that alert only you when someone enters your yard or opens your shed door.
Will the system include important and thorough fire detection?
2. Decide about fire protection and optionally recommended gas/fume detection to help detect natural gas leaks or carbon monoxide poisoning -- especially if you heat with any fuel type or cook with any fuel type.
Will you want almost free but not necessarily effective add ons that may work against you?
3. Decide on extras such as Medical Emergency Buttons for the physically impaired members of your family. If you do want this form of protection also consider that MEDICAL BUTTONS built into alarm systems can actually increase your risk of injury or death because they are not always the best choice for impaired members of your household. Always remember a button can only generate a general emergency alarm. The alarm company could provide a button you push for "medical emergency". Let's say you have an unexpected heart attack. Then you make the critical mistake of pushing the button before you collapse to the floor. The alarm company calls in a medical emergency to the emergency operations center in your city. The first question they will ask is "what is the specific emergency" and the response they will receive is "we don't know". It's not likely you will get a cardiac unit if one is available if they don't know you are likely a cardiac victim. Pushing that button versus voice to voice contact can literally kill you. In another case your child starts choking so you push the button for Medical Emergency. At the same time a mother across the city calls 911 frantically crying aloud for help as her child is also choking. The emergency operations center is now dealing with some unspecific call for help that could also be an accidental false alarm and also a known frantic mother with a choking child. They have 1 unit available at the moment. Do you think your child will be the one saved by the button? Highly unlikely. I don't like medical buttons because they give a genuinely false sense of aid and rescue. In reality they are disliked by those that must respond to the emergency and do nothing to convey the urgency and seriousness of your call. In other words they are easy to set aside for known emergencies and this is the formula for serious failure by the system to get the help you need. If you really need a medical response device, consider one of the live systems that use a pennant that allows you to call and talk to a monitoring center that in turn calls in your emergency and with vital information only a voice to voice communication will convey to 911 operators. And if you can reach a phone abandon all other methods of calling for help in favor of speaking to 911 operators yourself. Consider for the medically impaired a mini sized cell phone look-alike wireless phone that is easy to carry around and keeps the medically impaired accessible to the telephone. Dialing 911 on an open line in itself tells the 911 operator that someone is holding the phone after calling 911 and may not be able to speak. It may very well give them the live connection they need to conclude you are in serious medical trouble and will likely send medical and police authorities in response to your non verbalized call for help.
What does the alarm sales person really know about security system design.
4. Consider an alarm company that has an actual designer with 10 or more years of installation experience and one that is trained for alarm design and not sales and marketing closing techniques to get you to sign! Most sales people you will encounter will not be true system designers. Especially from large national companies which have no field designers but instead work through a network of generally inexperienced sales reps that they train for closing the sale, not designing the system. Why is this so important? Because these sales types will not see your home or business in the same way a designer will see it. A designer will be applying technology to detect a peril and with insight of techniques and approaches that a burglar will use to gain entry into your property. A good designer will inspect the inside of your home -- no doubt but most will also want to look at the home from the outside as well. it's the only way to see the property as the burglar will see it. When the alarm company representative asks to look at the outside of the home, it's a good sign they really know about design and it's important to have the burglars perspective on the approach to gain entry into your property. Also, ask a few key questions, such as how will the wire be installed. Designers understand the pathways through your walls, ceilings and crawlspace and are thinking about how they will route the wiring and tie the equipment together. This means they will often look in the crawl space and attic in order to know if it's likely or not that an actual wire can be run from point A to point B by the installer. Frequently an alarm system design must be changed when the system installer tries to install a system designed by someone that really doesn't know what they are doing. The exception is wireless alarm systems which are forgiving to the technical limitations of an improperly planned system lay-out.
How does the alarm report to the alarm company.. Is it magic or much less impressive?
5. Investigate the monitoring technology. Most systems use the ordinary telephone line for monitoring. Consider what happens if a burglar or thug cuts your phone line before they force entry. If you have more exposure than the average property owner, you might want to add secure monitoring links such as long range radio or cellular co-transmitters which are not so easily bypassed.
Where does the alarm signal actually go when an alarm occurs?
6. Find out where your alarm is truly being monitored. In today's mass marketing world of alarm packages, most of these systems are not monitored in the areas they are protecting. For example, your alarm in Chesapeake Virginia might be monitored by unfamiliar staff in Hampton - IOWA! Or your fire alarm system in Virginia Beach Virginia might be monitored in the city of Virginia in Minnesota! Why does this matter? Well for one it can be slow or even interrupted during holidays or inclement bad weather. It's run by people that have no knowledge of your neighborhood or sub-division. And during periods of bad weather in far and distant places, response to your signal could be delayed when they are forced to receive hundreds or thousands of alarm signals from all over the country as storms pass thru the country. While it's true that a distant monitoring center can technically function as quickly as a local facility, the odds are stacked against them with many variables that can cause a slow response to your emergency. You might not consider an alarm company that monitored your alarm in some office in INDIA, but there really little difference in time between monitoring in California or INDIA. They are almost the same when considering the technical aspects of providing a service that relies on multiple communication links such as many land based microwave towers and satellite uplinks/downlinks to send your signal thousands of miles away from where the actual emergency event.
Design your security specific to your needs and to some generic design offered to everyone.
7. Consider the layout of the system. Each home is different. Each family is unique. Each business or facility carries different risks and criminal types planning an intrusion. No packaged system offers a unique approach to your needs-- even when a predesigned package may be added to with optional additional sensors. Design your system from the ground up to be based on exactly what is needed and base it on the criminal type that is most likely to be attracted to your property. There are two methods of protection available. Pre-Entry detection attempts to detect the intruder BEFORE they have entered the property. Post-Entry detection attempts to detect the intruder after they have already entered. Consider now very seriously which type of detection is acceptable to you. If you have been a victim of a occupied home intrusion and have unfortunately been face to face with an intruder, it's doubtful that a Post Entry design will give you peace of mind. If you genuinely fear someone breaking in while you are sleeping, then a Pre-Entry design may be the only choice for you even at it's typical higher costs.
Post-Entry alarm detection is by far the most popular design but it will never be the preferred method by anyone that has already once been a victim. Nobody wants to be alarmed AFTER the intruder is already in the home and gets detected in the bedroom hallway right outside your possibly open bedroom door. It's actually a quite scary scenario when you think about it. However, Post-Entry systems are much lower cost so many people choose this design automatically and without really considering what if this system actually gets called into action one night.
Are you ok with knowing the burglar may already be inside your home when the alarm trips?
8 Post-Entry detection logic should include contact devices to detect the opening of all exterior doors, the door between the house and garage, and optionally recommended contact protection to detect opening of key and crucial windows that are deemed primary entry targets (thus the reason your designer should look at the home from the OUTSIDE even before designing from the inside). Next you will want to install spot area detectors for motion and in some cases glass breakage audio sensors (more on the downside of these in a moment). A textbook rule taught in sales class might be to add a motion sensor to the bedroom hallway. Why? Because it's possibly the "heart" of the home and one can't travel from one of the house to the other without entering this hallway. While this is a good and sound concept one should consider the horror of knowing the intruder is just 1 doorway away from your bedroom or your children's room. Plan on catching the intruder before they are in your bedroom hallway and this involves careful placement of additional motion or trap sensors in distant areas of likely passageway in the home. Getting the alarm from the garage/foyer/mud room area is a lot less scary when you are awakened at a safer distance at the other end of the house from the point of detection.
What devices offer the most protection in a world of many types of intrusion detection devices?
9. Know the difference between primary detection components and optional additional "catch" devices that might be installed because they "MIGHT" increase the chance of an earlier detection. An example of this are audio based and vibration based glass break detectors. These devices are approved for installation in alarm systems but they are imperfect detectors and are much more prone to failure to detect when compared to a contact switch on a door or a quality motion sensor in a distant game room. Glass break sensors rely on a signature of breaking glass either by sound or by vibration. These signatures vary greatly and for a sensor to be mostly false alarm free they must ignore many sounds that might be similar to glass breakage. They work amazingly well considering the high level of difficulty in discriminating false signals and reliably working with genuine glass breakage. False alarm preventing logic can also fail to activate on the real glass breakage and with sound altering variables such as closed blinds, breakage during other periods of noise such as entertainment sound sources like your TV or burglary during a high noise event such as lightning and wind storms.
Primary detection devices are solely contacts and traps installed at each opening to your home including the crawl space access and accessible 2nd story openings such as balcony doors and/or windows adjacent to roof lines, fence lines or trees and other climbable objects in your yard. Secondary detection devices include Passive Infrared Motion sensors, Glass Break Sensors, and trap devices such as invisible beams, under carpet floor mats, and trip devices such as light beams or other detection technologies or schemes. As secondary devices go, Passive Infrared motion detectors are highly reliable and rarely miss the detection. It is the only Secondary detection device that could be considered as crucial as primary detection points such as doors and openings. However, most systems do not have enough of these Passive Infrared sensors installed to provide a net gain of nearly instant detection shortly after an intruder merely gets his body thru the opening or within a few steps of the entry point. It would be wise to consider installing these sensors in EVERY junction point of a home where two different areas of the home meet. For many homes this would be in the Front Foyer, The Garage/to house junction where utility or laundry rooms or stairways move between floors. This also includes bedroom hallways and non sleeping rooms such as dens, game rooms, enclosed sunrooms or other points of entry on accessible floor levels such as a garage with windows and/or offices, washrooms, etc.
Can you really get protected for about $1.00 per day or with a FREE or $99.00 system?
10. Don't get caught up in the concept of it's only going to cost you $99.00 or less to get your system installed. Nobody wants to spend more than they have to, but if your genuine concern is the safety of your family, home or property, plan to spend what is needed to get a real system with practical and functional detection. Spend as much as you can afford if you can't afford what is truly needed. In the old days a fully equipped home alarm system easily cost $800.00 to $2500.00 or more. Sadly that did not change in time. It still costs the same as back then and in reality prices have come down when considering inflation. If you want to protect yourself, you'll need to design a system that addresses your needs and not just buy a fixed package that is sold across the board as a one size fits all solution.
Which system purchase plan actually offers the best deal and the maximum security?
11. Compare the real cost of a custom design system against a burglar alarm special advertised for around $1.00 per day or with artificially low prices such as $99.00 installed or even Free installations. Look at your cost over a 5 year period and you may very well find the ineffective $99.00 design cost as much or more than a fully custom system with a competitive monthly alarm monitoring package. Don't get tricked into thinking the low upfront cost system is actually a discount. If you factor in how long you are actually going to own your home, for some of us that could be 25 years or more. Paying an artificially high monthly rate for monitoring services in order to be offered a ultra low cost installation price (or even free) is actually agreeing to overpay every month for the life of the system and contract. A free or artificially priced low installation price always costs much more
Or your fire alarm system in Virginia Beach Virginia might be monitored in the city of Virginia in Minnesota! Why does this matter? Well for one it can be slow or even interrupted during holidays or inclement bad weather. It's run by people that have no knowledge of your neighborhood or sub-division. And during periods of bad weather in far and distant places, response to your signal could be delayed when they are forced to receive hundreds or thousands of alarm signals from all over the country as storms pass thru the country. While it's true that a distant monitoring center can technically function as quickly as a local facility, the odds are stacked against them with many variables that can cause a slow response to your emergency. You might not consider an alarm company that monitored your alarm in some office in INDIA, but there really little difference in time between monitoring in California or INDIA. They are almost the same when considering the technical aspects of providing a service that relies on multiple communication links such as many land based microwave towers and satellite uplinks/downlinks to send your signal thousands of miles away from where the actual emergency event.
Design your security specific to your needs and to some generic design offered to everyone.
7. Consider the layout of the system. Each home is different. Each family is unique. Each business or facility carries different risks and criminal types planning an intrusion. No packaged system offers a unique approach to your needs-- even when a predesigned package may be added to with optional additional sensors. Design your system from the ground up to be based on exactly what is needed and base it on the criminal type that is most likely to be attracted to your property. There are two methods of protection available. Pre-Entry detection attempts to detect the intruder BEFORE they have entered the property. Post-Entry detection attempts to detect the intruder after they have already entered. Consider now very seriously which type of detection is acceptable to you. If you have been a victim of a occupied home intrusion and have unfortunately been face to face with an intruder, it's doubtful that a Post Entry design will give you peace of mind. If you genuinely fear someone breaking in while you are sleeping, then a Pre-Entry design may be the only choice for you even at it's typical higher costs.
Post-Entry alarm detection is by far the most popular design but it will never be the preferred method by anyone that has already once been a victim. Nobody wants to be alarmed AFTER the intruder is already in the home and gets detected in the bedroom hallway right outside your possibly open bedroom door. It's actually a quite scary scenario when you think about it. However, Post-Entry systems are much lower cost so many people choose this design automatically and without really considering what if this system actually gets called into action one night.
Are you ok with knowing the burglar may already be inside your home when the alarm trips?
8 Post-Entry detection logic should include contact devices to detect the opening of all exterior doors, the door between the house and garage, and optionally recommended contact protection to detect opening of key and crucial windows that are deemed primary entry targets (thus the reason your designer should look at the home from the OUTSIDE even before designing from the inside). Next you will want to install spot area detectors for motion and in some cases glass breakage audio sensors (more on the downside of these in a moment). A textbook rule taught in sales class might be to add a motion sensor to the bedroom hallway. Why? Because it's possibly the "heart" of the home and one can't travel from one of the house to the other without entering this hallway. While this is a good and sound concept one should consider the horror of knowing the intruder is just 1 doorway away from your bedroom or your children's room. Plan on catching the intruder before they are in your bedroom hallway and this involves careful placement of additional motion or trap sensors in distant areas of likely passageway in the home. Getting the alarm from the garage/foyer/mud room area is a lot less scary when you are awakened at a safer distance at the other end of the house from the point of detection.
What devices offer the most protection in a world of many types of intrusion detection devices?
9. Know the difference between primary detection components and optional additional "catch" devices that might be installed because they "MIGHT" increase the chance of an earlier detection. An example of this are audio based and vibration based glass break detectors. These devices are approved for installation in alarm systems but they are imperfect detectors and are much more prone to failure to detect when compared to a contact switch on a door or a quality motion sensor in a distant game room. Glass break sensors rely on a signature of breaking glass either by sound or by vibration. These signatures vary greatly and for a sensor to be mostly false alarm free they must ignore many sounds that might be similar to glass breakage. They work amazingly well considering the high level of difficulty in discriminating false signals and reliably working with genuine glass breakage. False alarm preventing logic can also fail to activate on the real glass breakage and with sound altering variables such as closed blinds, breakage during other periods of noise such as entertainment sound sources like your TV or burglary during a high noise event such as lightning and wind storms.
Primary detection devices are solely contacts and traps installed at each opening to your home including the crawl space access and accessible 2nd story openings such as balcony doors and/or windows adjacent to roof lines, fence lines or trees and other climbable objects in your yard. Secondary detection devices include Passive Infrared Motion sensors, Glass Break Sensors, and trap devices such as invisible beams, under carpet floor mats, and trip devices such as light beams or other detection technologies or schemes. As secondary devices go, Passive Infrared motion detectors are highly reliable and rarely miss the detection. It is the only Secondary detection device that could be considered as crucial as primary detection points such as doors and openings. However, most systems do not have enough of these Passive Infrared sensors installed to provide a net gain of nearly instant detection shortly after an intruder merely gets his body thru the opening or within a few steps of the entry point. It would be wise to consider installing these sensors in EVERY junction point of a home where two different areas of the home meet. For many homes this would be in the Front Foyer, The Garage/to house junction where utility or laundry rooms or stairways move between floors. This also includes bedroom hallways and non sleeping rooms such as dens, game rooms, enclosed sunrooms or other points of entry on accessible floor levels such as a garage with windows and/or offices, washrooms, etc.
Can you really get protected for about $1.00 per day or with a FREE or $99.00 system?
10. Don't get caught up in the concept of it's only going to cost you $99.00 or less to get your system installed. Nobody wants to spend more than they have to, but if your genuine concern is the safety of your family, home or property, plan to spend what is needed to get a real system with practical and functional detection. Spend as much as you can afford if you can't afford what is truly needed. In the old days a fully equipped home alarm system easily cost $800.00 to $2500.00 or more. Sadly that did not change in time. It still costs the same as back then and in reality prices have come down when considering inflation. If you want to protect yourself, you'll need to design a system that addresses your needs and not just buy a fixed package that is sold across the board as a one size fits all solution.
Which system purchase plan actually offers the best deal and the maximum security?
Design your security specific to your needs and to some generic design offered to everyone.
7. Consider the layout of the system. Each home is different. Each family is unique. Each business or facility carries different risks and criminal types planning an intrusion. No packaged system offers a unique approach to your needs-- even when a predesigned package may be added to with optional additional sensors. Design your system from the ground up to be based on exactly what is needed and base it on the criminal type that is most likely to be attracted to your property. There are two methods of protection available. Pre-Entry detection attempts to detect the intruder BEFORE they have entered the property. Post-Entry detection attempts to detect the intruder after they have already entered. Consider now very seriously which type of detection is acceptable to you. If you have been a victim of a occupied home intrusion and have unfortunately been face to face with an intruder, it's doubtful that a Post Entry design will give you peace of mind. If you genuinely fear someone breaking in while you are sleeping, then a Pre-Entry design may be the only choice for you even at it's typical higher costs.
Post-Entry alarm detection is by far the most popular design but it will never be the preferred method by anyone that has already once been a victim. Nobody wants to be alarmed AFTER the intruder is already in the home and gets detected in the bedroom hallway right outside your possibly open bedroom door. It's actually a quite scary scenario when you think about it. However, Post-Entry systems are much lower cost so many people choose this design automatically and without really considering what if this system actually gets called into action one night.
Are you ok with knowing the burglar may already be inside your home when the alarm trips?
8 Post-Entry detection logic should include contact devices to detect the opening of all exterior doors, the door between the house and garage, and optionally recommended contact protection to detect opening of key and crucial windows that are deemed primary entry targets (thus the reason your designer should look at the home from the OUTSIDE even before designing from the inside). Next you will want to install spot area detectors for motion and in some cases glass breakage audio sensors (more on the downside of these in a moment). A textbook rule taught in sales class might be to add a motion sensor to the bedroom hallway. Why? Because it's possibly the "heart" of the home and one can't travel from one of the house to the other without entering this hallway. While this is a good and sound concept one should consider the horror of knowing the intruder is just 1 doorway away from your bedroom or your children's room. Plan on catching the intruder before they are in your bedroom hallway and this involves careful placement of additional motion or trap sensors in distant areas of likely passageway in the home. Getting the alarm from the garage/foyer/mud room area is a lot less scary when you are awakened at a safer distance at the other end of the house from the point of detection.
What devices offer the most protection in a world of many types of intrusion detection devices?
9. Know the difference between primary detection components and optional additional "catch" devices that might be installed because they "MIGHT" increase the chance of an earlier detection. An example of this are audio based and vibration based glass break detectors. These devices are approved for installation in alarm systems but they are imperfect detectors and are much more prone to failure to detect when compared to a contact switch on a door or a quality motion sensor in a distant game room. Glass break sensors rely on a signature of breaking glass either by sound or by vibration. These signatures vary greatly and for a sensor to be mostly false alarm free they must ignore many sounds that might be similar to glass breakage. They work amazingly well considering the high level of difficulty in discriminating false signals and reliably working with genuine glass breakage. False alarm preventing logic can also fail to activate on the real glass breakage and with sound altering variables such as closed blinds, breakage during other periods of noise such as entertainment sound sources like your TV or burglary during a high noise event such as lightning and wind storms.
Primary detection devices are solely contacts and traps installed at each opening to your home including the crawl space access and accessible 2nd story openings such as balcony doors and/or windows adjacent to roof lines, fence lines or trees and other climbable objects in your yard. Secondary detection devices include Passive Infrared Motion sensors, Glass Break Sensors, and trap devices such as invisible beams, under carpet floor mats, and trip devices such as light beams or other detection technologies or schemes. As secondary devices go, Passive Infrared motion detectors are highly reliable and rarely miss the detection. It is the only Secondary detection device that could be considered as crucial as primary detection points such as doors and openings. However, most systems do not have enough of these Passive Infrared sensors installed to provide a net gain of nearly instant detection shortly after an intruder merely gets his body thru the opening or within a few steps of the entry point. It would be wise to consider installing these sensors in EVERY junction point of a home where two different areas of the home meet. For many homes this would be in the Front Foyer, The Garage/to house junction where utility or laundry rooms or stairways move between floors. This also includes bedroom hallways and non sleeping rooms such as dens, game rooms, enclosed sunrooms or other points of entry on accessible floor levels such as a garage with windows and/or offices, washrooms, etc.
Can you really get protected for about $1.00 per day or with a FREE or $99.00 system?
10. Don't get caught up in the concept of it's only going to cost you $99.00 or less to get your system installed. Nobody wants to spend more than they have to, but if your genuine concern is the safety of your family, home or property, plan to spend what is needed to get a real system with practical and functional detection. Spend as much as you can afford if you can't afford what is truly needed. In the old days a fully equipped home alarm system easily cost $800.00 to $2500.00 or more. Sadly that did not change in time. It still costs the same as back then and in reality prices have come down when considering inflation. If you want to protect yourself, you'll need to design a system that addresses your needs and not just buy a fixed package that is sold across the board as a one size fits all solution.
Which system purchase plan actually offers the best deal and the maximum security?
11. Compare the real cost of a custom design system against a burglar alarm special advertised for around $1.00 per day or with artificially low prices such as $99.00 installed or even Free installations. Look at your cost over a 5 year period and you may very well find the ineffective $99.00 design cost as much or more than a fully custom system with a competitive monthly alarm monitoring package. Don't get tricked into thinking the low upfront cost system is actually a discount. If you factor in how long you are actually going to own your home, for some of us that could be 25 years or more. Paying an artificially high monthly rate for monitoring services in order to be offered a ultra low cost installation price (or even free) is actually agreeing to overpay every month for the life of the system and contract. A free or artificially priced low installation price always costs much more than a correctly designed professional grade custom system designed specifically for your needs!
The real facts about buying a burglar alarm system.
By: Bill Agreste, Pres. Vulcan Security Systems, Inc.
I designed my first alarm system back in 1974. Back then we had very little in the form of technology and catching or derailing a burglary was --- well it was an art form. Using wires, switches, and expensive photo cells to detect a break in a light path (as a burglar walked thru the pathway) was the essence of how alarm systems were built back then. We didn't have high energy marketing specialists designing security. No! Alarm designers were actually highly technical and skilled experts that could just as easily install the alarm ... or design it. And our planning wasn't based on creating vast numbers of clients and building large sums of recurring revenue (from overpriced monitoring fees). Our systems were planned around outsmarting the burglar. Basically, we had to design in anticipation of a burglars actions at a particular facility, home or business. By: Bill Agreste, Pres. Vulcan Security Systems, Inc.
It's much different today! Now alarms are designed in corporate offices, they are sold by narrowcast sales people that know little about system planning and whose only experiences comes from the boiler plate sales training rooms of the largest so called alarm companies nationwide. It wouldn't be untrue to say the alarm sales person (called a security designer or security expert) knows little more than you do about burglary and robbery criminal logic and are ill prepared to design a truly effective system.
This is a guideline that will help you find the best possible system design and at the best possible price and with the best possible monitoring service to summon the Police Fire or Rescue authorities when you need it the most.
This guideline is not meant to replace the expertise of a real alarm designer and should not be considered the sole pathway to an effective system. In fact, it is impossible to cover all scenarios in this short form guide so see the advice of a true professional before selecting a final design for your home or business.
What are you trying to protect against?
1. Decide if you are wanting protection from burglary and other break-in type crimes or if you want expanded protection that might include pre-warning alarms that alert only you when someone enters your yard or opens your shed door.
Will the system include important and thorough fire detection?
2. Decide about fire protection and optionally recommended gas/fume detection to help detect natural gas leaks or carbon monoxide poisoning -- especially if you heat with any fuel type or cook with any fuel type.
Will you want almost free but not necessarily effective add ons that may work against you?
3. Decide on extras such as Medical Emergency Buttons for the physically impaired members of your family. If you do want this form of protection also consider that MEDICAL BUTTONS built into alarm systems can actually increase your risk of injury or death because they are not always the best choice for impaired members of your household. Always remember a button can only generate a general emergency alarm. The alarm company could provide a button you push for "medical emergency". Let's say you have an unexpected heart attack. Then you make the critical mistake of pushing the button before you collapse to the floor. The alarm company calls in a medical emergency to the emergency operations center in your city. The first question they will ask is "what is the specific emergency" and the response they will receive is "we don't know". It's not likely you will get a cardiac unit if one is available if they don't know you are likely a cardiac victim. Pushing that button versus voice to voice contact can literally kill you. In another case your child starts choking so you push the button for Medical Emergency. At the same time a mother across the city calls 911 frantically crying aloud for help as her child is also choking. The emergency operations center is now dealing with some unspecific call for help that could also be an accidental false alarm and also a known frantic mother with a choking child. They have 1 unit available at the moment. Do you think your child will be the one saved by the button? Highly unlikely. I don't like medical buttons because they give a genuinely false sense of aid and rescue. In reality they are disliked by those that must respond to the emergency and do nothing to convey the urgency and seriousness of your call. In other words they are easy to set aside for known emergencies and this is the formula for serious failure by the system to get the help you need. If you really need a medical response device, consider one of the live systems that use a pennant that allows you to call and talk to a monitoring center that in turn calls in your emergency and with vital information only a voice to voice communication will convey to 911 operators. And if you can reach a phone abandon all other methods of calling for help in favor of speaking to 911 operators yourself. Consider for the medically impaired a mini sized cell phone look-alike wireless phone that is easy to carry around and keeps the medically impaired accessible to the telephone. Dialing 911 on an open line in itself tells the 911 operator that someone is holding the phone after calling 911 and may not be able to speak. It may very well give them the live connection they need to conclude you are in serious medical trouble and will likely send medical and police authorities in response to your non verbalized call for help.
What does the alarm sales person really know about security system design.
4. Consider an alarm company that has an actual designer with 10 or more years of installation experience and one that is trained for alarm design and not sales and marketing closing techniques to get you to sign! Most sales people you will encounter will not be true system designers. Especially from large national companies which have no field designers but instead work through a network of generally inexperienced sales reps that they train for closing the sale, not designing the system. Why is this so important? Because these sales types will not see your home or business in the same way a designer will see it. A designer will be applying technology to detect a peril and with insight of techniques and approaches that a burglar will use to gain entry into your property. A good designer will inspect the inside of your home -- no doubt but most will also want to look at the home from the outside as well. it's the only way to see the property as the burglar will see it. When the alarm company representative asks to look at the outside of the home, it's a good sign they really know about design and it's important to have the burglars perspective on the approach to gain entry into your property. Also, ask a few key questions, such as how will the wire be installed. Designers understand the pathways through your walls, ceilings and crawlspace and are thinking about how they will route the wiring and tie the equipment together. This means they will often look in the crawl space and attic in order to know if it's likely or not that an actual wire can be run from point A to point B by the installer. Frequently an alarm system design must be changed when the system installer tries to install a system designed by someone that really doesn't know what they are doing. The exception is wireless alarm systems which are forgiving to the technical limitations of an improperly planned system
How does the alarm report to the alarm company.. Is it magic or much less impressive?
5. Investigate the monitoring technology. Most systems use the ordinary telephone line for monitoring. Consider what happens if a burglar or thug cuts your phone line before they force entry. If you have more exposure than the average property owner, you might want to add secure monitoring links such as long range radio or cellular co-transmitters which are not so easily bypassed.
Where does the alarm signal actually go when an alarm occurs?
6. Find out where your alarm is truly being monitored. In today's mass marketing world of alarm packages, most of these systems are not monitored in the areas they are protecting. For example, your alarm in Chesapeake Virginia might be monitored by unfamiliar staff in Hampton - IOWA!