External alarm boxes - self activating?

[Andrew Gabriel]

No, they normally just disable it, or it might just carry on running until it next needs an engineer reset, at which point you're stuffed. They won't give you engineering access to it though. They would only come and remove the panel if it was quite new, or if there is a contract term saying they can charge you for removing it if you cancel the contract. None of the other bits will be worth removing unless they can charge you for doing so.

If you do buy it from them, make sure you get the installation manuals and engineering access code. Often they won't give this to you even if you do buy it, so you basically wasted your money.

Generally, you find that you don't own an alarm unless you know the engineering access code.

[matthew.larkin]

Why do people bother with alarm systems at all? Burglary is a very low incidence crime in most areas these days. Surely just a dummy bell box would be equally as good as an actual alarm - from experience round here, no-one responds to a sounded alarm, they just go "tut-tut" and carry on with their business.

If I were planning on breaking and entering, I would scan the road for any houses without a bell box and do those - after all, how do I tell the difference between a bell box with a working alarm and a bell box without an alarm?

Matt

[Tim Lamb]

In message , [e-mail] writes

The last house burglary, I was actually working within 100m. Whether I would have heard an alarm over the noise from a running diesel is moot but there are other people who would have responded.

I have had *asset re-locators* in since fitting an alarm but they didn't touch the house.

I don't know if dummy bell boxes mimic the glowing lamp filaments of a real one.

regards

[dennis]

Which is true, you wouldn't have a UPS if you didn't need the protection.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Then I'd say you need to cultivate your neighbours. If an immediate neighbour's alarm was ringing I'd certainly investigate. And I'd think they'd do the same for me. That investigation on my part would only be looking for signs of a break in and then contacting the police if there was.

[Andrew Gabriel]

Well, the neighbours in my road certainly listen out for and investigate each others' alarms. I would agree that if your neighbours don't, the value of the alarm is somewhat dimished. False alarms also dimish the value very rapidly. My advice to people fitting an alarm is not to fit (or maybe not to connect up) the outside sounder until you've had a reasonable period with no false alarms. Otherwise you will probably exhaust your neighbour's likelyhood of investigating with one or two false alarms before the system is settled in and you're used to using it.

I would say a monitored alarm isn't worth having for any deterent value -- most burglaries are over before the call gets put through to the police. It may be useful from the point of view of getting the place secured again whilst you aren't there, if you can't rely on your neighbours to do that for you.

As has been often said here, any insurance discount you take for having an alarm is usually not a smart move.

An alarm is only one aspect. To avoid being broken into, you just have to make sure your house doesn't look like the best and easiest target in the area. There are lots of other considerations which go into that too, and an alarm probably isn't the first.

[ARWadsworth]

Exactly. Mind you I did fit the alarms to the nextdoor neighbours, next door but one and the house across from me.

Adam