Lots of people have and are getting home alarms these days. Here's a piece of advice before your sign up for service with Protection One: Don't.Let me tell you my story.
She Who Puts Up With Me and I never really gave much thought to alarm systems before we moved into our present house back in 1997. The house came already equipped with an alarm system which had (we believed) been disconnected. Since we didn't really care that much, we didn't bother to get it reconnected.
An incident a month or two later which involved a false alarm and the police coming to our door at 5 AM made us realize that the alarm wasn't as disconnected as we thought. We decided to look into having the alarm reconnected, if for no other reason than so we would know what the codes were.The alarm technician was very nice.
He came to our house, reset all the codes, changed the batteries, and told us we had to sign a three-year contract for the monitoring service. We very nearly called the whole thing off then and there, but figured we would probably be staying in the house for at least three years ("What happens if we move before the contract is up?" I asked the technician.
"You either have to buy out the rest of the contract, or get an alarm for your new house." This was a taste of things to come).Fast-forward six years and change. The company we had originally signed up with had been bought by Protection One, and we had been faithfully paying almost $30/month for alarm monitoring service, which amounts to over $2,000 since we signed up. We were looking for ways to trim our expenses, and hit upon the alarm monitoring service.
"What are we really getting for $30/month?" I asked."Well, we've had a whole bunch of false alarms, a couple of fines from the city for police calls when your dad set off the alarm accidentally, and the local police department now charges everyone $10/year to register their alarms because they've had too many false alarms. Oh, and they've now got a late fee of $30, so if we miss the payment by a day or two, it doubles," She replied.
