How does a pre-wired alarm system for an apartment get set up?
August 30, 2010 by
Filed under american alarm company
Ok so my apartment its wired for an intrusion alarm. Last year when i lived there I did not set it up, but this year I am wanting more information on how to exactly go about setting one up. The key pad is already installed so I am guessing I need a company to set it up. Does anyone know about how much this cost per month and how to go about setting one up? Any information will be useful!
From my experience working at an alarm system company in the United States it would just be a matter of contacting the company that installed it and having them activate it. You MIGHT be able to have another company activate it, I’m not sure. I would doubt it though, considering anytime somebody wanted to switch to our company from another one, we installed a new system. Our rates were $30 per month and the lowest contract time we did was 2 years. If you’re not in the US it might be a bit different, but that hopefully will give you some basic practices of alarm companies.
check that lease you signed to see if an alarm violates the lease. they won’t stop the bogeyman, though
The alarm system work by calling the monitoring systems phone number with a modem. If you can figure out what the make and model of the alarm board is, find a manual and reset it to the default installer code, you can program it to call your cell phone and that of your neighbours thereby avoiding a monthly monitoring fee and the licensing with the police department. You can swap out your alarm board with a newer cellular phone based one and use a prepaid cell phone sim card so that the alarm system can send text messages, the prepaid credits will keep expiring but it should be less expensive than a monitoring service. Keep in mind that if you do sign up with a monitoring company, they are going to change the installer code to their own code which they won’t give you, they will give you the master code but that’s not what you need, if you don’t pay them, they will also lock your board but there are places on the internet that will unlock the board for you and new alarm boards are very inexpensive to purchase. When you sign up with an alarm company, they usually swap your existing board out with one of theirs, sometimes it’s less expensive than resetting the board and training their technicians on multiple boards. Research on alarm systems self monitoring to find out more.
You have a couple of different options. You can call up a large company to see if they will monitor it for you. Sometimes, they won’t monitor equipment that was not installed by them. The large companies would include ADT, Brinks, Protect America, etc. Stay away from Protect America, I have read some bad reviews about them. Here are some prices on ADT per month:
http://www.teepeetech.com/home-security-systems/how-much-does-adt-cost-month-31.html
and then a comparison of ADT to another company in costs:
http://www.teepeetech.com/home-security-systems/home-security-systems-cost-comparison-11.html
You can also have an external company monitor your alarm system. There is one called Alarm Relay, another called Monitronics:
http://www.teepeetech.com/home-security-systems/monitronics-alarm-system-review-27.html
Those companies usually charge lower fees per month than ADT would. ADT is about $30 / month or so. Another thing too with ADT, is that they will want you to sign a 3 year contract. That’s not the best if you live in an apartment. They do offer a moving clause I believe, but I hate signing contracts, so you could try out one of the other alarm monitoring companies and see what you think. I have ADT and think it is pretty good, but I also have a house and have been there for a while. I’m not so sure I would go with them if I had an apartment and didn’t know how long I would be there.