Burglar Alarm Systems

By: Michal Mirkovich Click author's name for more of his/her articles

If you want to keep your home secure, and cut your home insurance premium into the bargain, it might be a good idea to install a burglar alarm. Here, we shall look at all the available options in order to help you decide which one is best suited to your home, and to your budget.

If you just want your alarm to scare off burglars and alert your neighbours, then you should go for the cheapest option, which is bells only alarm system. All this will do is make a noise when one or more of your burglar alarm sensors are triggered, and it should cost somewhere in the region of three hundred and fifty to six hundred pounds to install.

However, a faulty alarm system could be worse than no alarm at all, so it might be worth spending a little extra getting your system maintained regularly. You can get a maintenance contract for your alarm for 50-80GBP per annum that will ensure that your alarm is regularly checked and serviced by a qualified technician, and that you have some legal fallback if anything does go wrong with your system.

You can also arrange for your, or the other key holders for your property, to be automatically contacted whenever your alarm goes off, by signing up to a monitoring contract.

In order to minimise the occurrence of false alarms, the majority of monitoring companies demand that you also have a maintenance contract before they are prepared to offer this service. At 70 to 180GBP per year plus maintenance fees and call costs, this is not exactly a cheap option, but it could be well worth it if you have no neighbours or a lot of valuable goods in your home.

Even more expensive than monitoring contracts are police response systems, which let the local police department know whenever two or more of your alarm sensors are triggered.

However, the police will only respond to these alarms if they have the necessary resources available, which may not be possible at busy times. Also, if you have more than three false alarms in a year, or four in Scotland, they will cut off your service until you can prove that your alarm has been repaired or replaced. Expect to pay upwards of 280GBP per annum for this service, plus maintenance fees and a one off 45GBP registration fee.

An automatic speech dialer could be a more cost effective option for those who want to be contacted when their alarm goes off, but do not fancy paying the annual fees involved in a manned monitoring scheme. These devices, which cost around 100 to 150GBP plus call expenses, can be set up to phone a few different numbers whenever your alarm goes off and leave an automated message if there is a response.

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