I won’t plug the company or equipment, but I did want to let people know what we learned.
We have had an alarm system and monitoring service for 10ish years. My wife insisted on getting one back when my job had frequent travel. Did the job, when our home was broke into a few years ago. That was back when I had two 85lb dogs in the house, the burglar left without closing the door behind him. Great, mission accomplished.
Well, technology has come a long way in that time. There are companies that will upgrade your system and your monthly monitoring is the same price. So, we upgraded and have the added benefits of not just phone line monitoring but WiFi and gsm cellular as well. Very handy if a phone line is cut. We upgraded a few sensors as well, adding smoke/heat detectors and motion. Another new feature is the smart phone app. We can completely control the system with our phones and see event logs, plus email and text notifications of trouble signals or if the alarm has been tripped. Lastly, we got a key fob that sets or unsets the alarm and it has a panick button which notifies the monitoring service who can dispatch police.
It has been so much less trouble to set the alarm while getting kids in the truck etc. and if you have one of those “oh man, did I set the alarm” moments, just pull up the app and check. Forgot to set it before getting into bed, no problem, do it on your phone.
If you don’t have a system, they are affordable and if you have an old system it might be worth looking into upgrading.
One thing the installers told me was that phone lines can run light bulbs. They mentioned there’s a youtube video showing how to do it. That could be really helpful if the power is out. So I will be looking into that. Maybe the resident angry scientist has already tinkered with this idea…
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