NBR: Alarm systems

Temp925407062502290 · May 2011

Please recommend your alarm company. We had an incident here the night of my sister's wedding shower and a scare the other night that turned out funny. We don't want to spend a lot but also want window security not just door.

What happened the other night is at 1:30am I heard the top stairs gate (which is outside our MB door) open. It took me 2 seconds to register everything. I get up screaming on the top of my lungs and clapping. My DH who has no idea what I heard or what is going on flies out of bed with me and does not have his glasses on screaming with me. Well I go first to look down the stairs because he has no clue and see the gate separated at the top like 3 inches. I then calmed down and my DH is now guarding the hall. He turns and says well that is the issue. The gate went through the drywall without anyway touching it and made a nice hole. I went to bed laughing at the whole situation. Oh BTW the kids never woke up by our screaming. Really weird but nice?!?

maykat · May 2011

we have ADT. I've been happy with them, but we've never had the alarm go off. One thing I like, is there are 2 buttons that link directly to the fire dept and police dept. We pay $29/month. You can pay extra and have your smoke alarms hooked up as well.

We have glass breaks and door sensors. You can do window sensors too (we don't have these because most of our windows are painted shut-really old)

susangilchrist · May 2011

We've also got ADT and have been very happy. My mom recently got Ackerman, and they're good too. Their "deal" is that you have to buy a system up front, and then monthly monitoring is less than $20 per month. Her system was a "middle of the road" one that included glass break sensors. It was close to $2K. We used one of the authorized providers from one of those pennysaver magazines for our ADT (it was Brinks back then) and we paid almost nothing up front and now pay $25 a month - we don't have the glass sensors. We called the main ADT number when looking into a system for my mom, and they were MUCH higher to install. I'd recommend looking around and getting one of the "free installation" systems you see advertised.