My fairly elderly parents have a fairly elderly alarm system. They are currently being charged about £25 per month by a maintenance company, and I'd like to know how easy it would be to do the maintenance myself. FWIW, they already have several noisy dogs and live in a safe area, so I'm not sure this thing is worth the cost of the contract. The user manual identifies it as an Anglian "Defender 3000", but this doesn't generate any hits in Google; presumably it's a rebadged version of a better known model.
The supplied manuals are very basic and don't even tell you how to change the batteries in the wireless sensors without setting it off, ensuring a reliable revenue stream for the maintenance company. There's a picture of it here:
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ideas on what it is and how I perform basic maintenance?
The alarm probably belongs to the maintenance company, and you will not have the relevant access codes to maintain it yourself. Check the contract you have with them.
It looks like a wireless alarm, and if you are happy with those, just cancel the contract and ask them to collect it (which they might not bother doing) and buy and install your own.
Thanks for the replies. I'm pretty sure the alarm was belongs to my parents - they have the receipts for the initial installation. The maintenance company (no longer part of Anglian) just replace batteries in the numerous wireless sensors, check the bellbox, keyfobs and smoke alarm. The alarm doesn't have a numeric keypad, so presumably it can be put into maintenance mode by pressing some combination of the buttons in the photo and the button on the user's keyfob, or using a special engineer's wireless keyfob, in which case I'm stuffed.
I had a dead battery, and having been quoted 89 quid for an annual maintenance contract that appeared to do absolutely nothing, I changed them myself. Alarm system was something predating ADT, from about 1980. Not wireless, needless to say.
I made sure it was a dry day, when climbing a ladder to smash the bejeezus out of the bell box would be a viable option if it all went pear-shaped.
If any neighbours have small children, make sure they are not asleep. Insert earplugs. Turn off power supply to alarm. If that causes the external sounder to go off, the battery on the internal box is dead. Since your low battery lightis not showing, I'm presuming the battery is not dead. Open up the internal box. Figure out where the tamper switch is.
You have two options: a) Turn the power back on, press tamper switch, enter alarm code (errr, can't see how you do this using the front panel, is there a fob?) Everything should now be silent. If you electrocute yourself doing this, it isn't my fault, and you'll need to be able to do everything else one handed, as you'll be pressing the tamper switch in with one hand.
b) Work with the external siren going.
Swap the batteries over. You may, of course, now find that the internal siren goes off. If it doesn't, it will when you close the box, as you'll need to release the tamper switch... That's why you need earplugs.
In my case, I changed the batteries, and still had an alarm system that triggered in a powercut. It turned out that there were a couple of fuses on the PCB, one of which had blown. These were both standard 1A, and easily changed.
Dispose of the old battery in an appropriate manner.
For 25 quid a month, you could just buy a new wireless system every year.
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