The Benefits of monitored alarm systems

• Police Response for Monitored Alarms
  The Police may longer respond to a bell-only alarm unless there is additional evidence of a crime being committed. The Police will respond to a monitored alarm which qualifies for Police response.However if you have a bell-only alarm system you are relying on your neighbours to quickly come to your aid, which may put them at risk, and you cannot be sure that they will always be there to respond.

• Immediate Response for Monitored Personal Attack Button
  A ‘Personal Attack’ signal from a monitored alarm will be immediately policed. With a bell-only alarm, you are relying on a neighbour coming to your aid.
• Duress Signal
  With a monitored alarm, you can send a secret code signal to the Alarm Receiving Centre if you are forced to turn off the alarm. With a bell-only alarm, the bell would be stopped and no one would be alerted to help you.
• Fire Safety
  Most battery operated smoke detectors are not properly maintained and a conventional stand-alone smoke detector may not activate fast enough to ensure the occupants are woken up in time.A unique Carbon Monoxide Fire Detector detects lethal smouldering fires much quicker than conventional smoke detectors. When linked into your monitored alarm system, we can call the Fire Brigade if you are incapacitated. The Fire monitoring part of the alarm system stays ‘set’ even if the main intruder alarm is not ‘set’.
• Fire Protection
  If you are not in the house and fire breaks out, you are relying on a neighbour/passer by to call the Fire Brigade.With a monitored alarm system, the monitored Fire Detector can rapidly detect the fire, and our Alarm Receiving Centre will quickly call the Fire Brigade.
• Emergency Help
  If you require emergency medical assistance you can press an ‘Assistance’ button on your panel and we will call you to find out what is wrong. We can then phone a key holder to assist you, or in some areas we may be able to contact the Ambulance Service directly, (although we cannot guarantee that the Ambulance Service will accept the call).
• Online Fault Rectification
  With a bell-only alarm if a fault develops an Engineer will most likely need to attend the site. The homeowner will then have to wait for an Engineer to arrive.With a monitored alarm system using the latest RESOLVE technology, we can send an “electronic toolbox” down the monitoring line, to carry out fault diagnostics and rectifications. More than 65% of faults can be resolved without the need for an Engineer to attend, so saving the homeowner the time of waiting for the Engineer.
• False Alarm Management
  With a monitored alarm you have an internal siren to deter the burglar, but you do not necessarily need a loud external siren because you are not relying on neighbours/passers by to come to your aid (they very rarely will – most neighbours get fed up with ringing burglar alarms).If you are away for a period of time (e.g. on holiday) and there is a problem with your alarm which requires entry to the house to rectify we can alert a key holder.With a bell-only system a fault may persist for the whole time you are away, and no one may be available to attend to the problem.
• Toxic Gas Monitoring
  We can add Carbon Monoxide detectors (as distinct from Carbon Monoxide Fire Detectors) to systems, to detect faulty boilers etc.

NB All Monitored Alarms calling for a Police Response must have a Unique Reference No (URN): issued by your local force. This is applied for on your behalf by us as the installing Company and each application requires £52.18 fee to accompany it. Police response will only be available if the Alarm Receiving Station are able to quote the URN, when asking for Police Assistance. The issue of the URN by the Police can take up to 4 weeks or so, after install for them to process your application. Some police forces are now charging for an additional URN to cover Personal Alarms.

Call Charge Problems

Some customers are encountering communication charging problems with Monitored Alarms where they are using a Telephone Service Provider other than BT. Monitored Alarms dial out as a matter of routine to an Alarm Receiving Centre using your telephone line as provided. It will dial a non-geographical 0871 Telephone Number regularly.

We are encountering instances relating to some telephone service providers where the Alarm cannot always connect first time, and will continue to repeat the call time and time again until it succeeds. This can incur multiple charges for the call which are in line with your telephone service providers contract charges for non-geographical numbers and is caused because of the way the Telephone Service provider may route calls which can corrupt the Alarms data transmission and cause the system to redial until it succeeds in sending the data.

May I remind everyone that It is the Customers responsibility and their expense to provide a working telephone line for the alarm and we cannot accept responsibility for excessive charges caused by the alarm being unable to communicate successfully in such circumstances.

As a workaround we can route the calls via an 0800 number or install an GPRS module onto the system to bypass the landline problems. Both these solutions will incur additional charges to make the change and if required you should contact the office 0n 0300 303 2536 should you wish to switch the default transmission path of your alarm.

This problem has only recently come to light and is due to the increasing use of secondary telephone service providers.