My wife thinks we need a bit more security on the house. We have a Ring doorbell and small security light and I thought we might as well get the alarm they do as well. But she thinks we should go with a ‘proper alarm’ company.

Anyone use anything they’d recommend? We live slightly back from the road in a fairly rural location and she gets a bit worried when left home alone with the kids.

A Rhodesian Ridgeback or a Rotty.
People seem to take no notice of alarms.

We replaced a 20 yr old wired professional job the other month with Ring – door and room motion sensors, internal and external sirens. Seems much better than the old tech we removed.

We have a large-ish dog but the most harm he’d do to an intruder is an excited wee on their trouser leg.

Good to hear the Ring replacing a ‘proper alarm’…

Surely it has to be Verisure?? The ads are so sincere

For me, alarms are a bit like kitchens. Better with a small independent with local recommendations rather than the big firms with fancy ad budgets.

I don’t get the door sensor bit of alarms. If a wrongun wants something they won’t kindly open the door or window. They’d smash its face in. Motion sensors on the other hand…..that’s why we have Arlo cameras. Only 2 cams and a doorbell at the mo but a growing collection. Has quite a comprehensive arm/disarm alarm feature. Still finding my feet but happy so far.

Just to add we looked into the pro setup and decided the outlay and monthly payments wasn’t worth it for something that would just make a noise. We get email notifications from the Arlo system.

The alarm needs to go off when breaking in not when the intruder is in.
Therefore I would have shock sensors on doors and windows.

Just bear in mind a ‘proper’ alarm will probably come with a yearly maintenance cost.

If you’re thinking it’ll also reduce your house insurance, when I looked in to it ours would have been a grand total reduction of £11 for the year, and for that we’d have to have the above mentioned maintenance (£100) and downstairs would need to be alarmed every night.

I used to fit intruder alarms for a living. I still vaguely stay in touch.
Verisure have a very poor rep in the trade.

Ripping a 20 year old wired system out for a modern system is fair enough, I’d be interested to see if the Ring system lasts 20 years or even 5.

Most decent systems can have some sort of alarm notification.

We’re going to go down the alarm route at some point. Our bike workshop at the end of the garden (50m from the house) currently backs onto the Railway. However, Network Rail have agreed to give away 10′ of the land for a bike path. So we’re going to have a public path right next to it! Which means, litter, graffiti, petty vandalism and almost certainly several burglary attempts. I’m thinking a pro system with one of those smoke things which completely fills the room so you can’t see your hand in front of your face etc.

Smoke cloak. They used to be manufactured near where our office was, Concept IRRC . I was involved in installing a system on their office. Never got to see it go off thankfully.

A Master Blaster isn’t a bad a idea, if you can still get them. A smoke filled room with one of those in it would be pretty disorientating.

I’ve seen cctv footage of a smoke cloak deployed in a Vodafone shop in Swansea, the perps left via the hole in the ceiling they’d made and did not hang around.
But then you’d need a thermal lance to cut the stock cages and whatnot.

I’ve recently installed a Ring system and and happy with it.

We’ve got 3 external cameras, 1 floodlight (wired) and two spotlight (wireless) along with 2 internal cameras, 5 motion sensors and a number of window and door sensors along with a siren and doorbell.

All in, including the annual monitoring and all of the 3G backup, etc, it was around £750. Over 3 years, it’ll be ~£900 including the monitoring. This was about 3.5-4x less than any other system we looked at which included monitoring.

So far the system has picked up the reg plate of a van used to steal a motorbike from elsewhere in the village and has allowed us to see someone trying car doors.

You can remote active any individual camera/siren, setup motion alerts, catchment zones, etc. It all seems to work nicely together.

I’m aware that a wifi jammer would kill some of the cameras/sensors, but even that would be notified to you.

Good piece of mind for minimal annual cost.

I work for Verisure and sometimes I’d have a hard time recommending them.

The “poor rep in the trade” is most likely down to the bad installations from certain sales people.

I hate the procedures for installs (the sales do the install). Some are really good and you end up with a good system that does exactly what you want.

Others are terrible and I’ve spent hours at customer’s houses putting right silly mistakes and rush-jobs.

When you get a good install, they work great. I’ve been to a lot of customers where the Zero Vision (smoke thing) has prevented a break in, or at the very worst stopped one mid-attempt.

You’ll probably get the hard-sell with sales though and there is an install fee and monthly cost. You also have to watch for the sales guys outright lying. I’ve had issues with a few of them and getting sick of filling reports out.

I will say this though, the Trust Pilot reviews are genuine. I know this because we get a commission for every review that mentions your name and a verified customer has to leave the review.

They seem to have employed a number of 90’s second hand car salesmen…

A Master Blaster isn’t a bad a idea,

I have Tinitus already and am really sensitive to loud noises, so wouldn’t want to risk a false alarm!

I work for Verisure and sometimes I’d have a hard time recommending them.

Nice to hear from the other side, I sometimes get to see pics of their installs….

I have Tinitus already and am really sensitive to loud noises, so wouldn’t want to risk a false alarm!

Me too, probably not unrelated to years of having to disable malfunctioning cheap shite or badly maintained security systems.

No reason it couldn’t be on a short timer. By the time you enter it’ll have stopped. The external sounder should be on a timer anyway. Used to be 20mins. Probably shorter now.

Failing that, land mines.

The external sounder should be on a timer anyway. Used to be 20mins. Probably shorter now.

Whenever a local alarm goes awol it seems to sound for the set limit (eg 20 mins) then go quiet for 30 secs, then just sound again and repeat 24/7 till the owners come back and reset it.

We always used to set re-arms to zero for that reason.
Can’t remember the regs, I quit it some time ago.
I work on fire suppression these days.

Go with ADT if you want a lying salesman who gives you a rubbish system after selling it off as something else and then want to deal with customer service who keep quoting irrelevant sections of the contract at you while completely ignoring your requests for them to clarify why they are not complying with the sections that very clearly cover your particular issue and makes them liable.
After much fighting and banging of head against walls you might even get them to offer a paltry and useless “goodwill gesture”, of course implying that the whole thing is your fault and they’re being nice (if patronising) about it but by that point you are so sick of the whole saga that you accept, and then spend the rest of your life regretting not finishing the fight seeing as it was so clearly spelled out in their contract but they went mysteriously blind/deaf to parts of every message you sent
(5 hours later)
*deep breath*

I’m not bitter.

Has anyone actually done proper studies of the dissuasive affect of different systems? The fact that insurers dont discount when installed suggests they aren’t much use.

Has anyone looked at the Eufy camera/doorbell solutions?

https://uk.eufylife.com/products/e8210?ref=navimenu

They come with local storage, so no need for a subscription-based cloud storage solution which seems to be what a lot of these devices rely on.
I think that if you buy a camera system with this storage option, you can then add the doorbell & it will save to the same storage device.

We have had some break-ins in the area in the last couple of months, as well as someone going through my Wife’s car one night while it was (unlocked) on the driveway.
I am not sure that the cameras offer much security/deterrent benefit (the camera can’t see past a hoodie), but my Wife has mentioned getting something sorted out several times now, so……

Go with ADT if you want a lying salesman who gives you a rubbish system after selling it off as something else and then want to deal with customer service who keep quoting irrelevant sections of the contract at you while completely ignoring your requests for them to clarify why they are not complying with the sections that very clearly cover your particular issue and makes them liable.

Ha, nothing changes then! I ripped many an ADT system out BITD.

Your best bet is usually a local business of a reasonable size.

If a wrongun wants something they won’t kindly open the door or window. They’d smash its face in.

I don’t agree – the last thing a burglar wants is to draw attention to themselves – they would much rather try to pry open a door/window (or even better, find one that has been left unlocked) than smash their way in.

Has anyone actually done proper studies of the dissuasive affect of different systems? The fact that insurers dont discount when installed suggests they aren’t much use.

I don’t have one and it’d cost me next to nothing to fit one.
I do have incredibly nosey neighbors who are always in, a noisy dog next door and my work hours are very irregular.