There are many different types of home security, but the only one that offers real peace of mind for your family, and protection for your possessions, is a home monitored system. When you have home security monitoring, your alarms are monitored by professionals day and night throughout the year, and they will send the proper response team, whether it is the police, fire department or emergency medical personnel, to your home within minutes.

What is Home Monitoring?

When your home security system is monitored, there is constant communication between your system and your security provider. When your system receives an emergency signal such as a break-in or fire, it communicates with the central monitoring station where the proper authorities are notified and sent to your home.

You’ll have a system control panel that is the center of a network of sensors on the places of your choosing. This may be windows and doors and may include sensors for motion detectors, tampering, flood, smoke or temperature. When any of these sensors are triggered, they send a message to the monitoring station via your telephone or through a wireless modem.

The monitoring center will immediately phone you to verify that the emergency is not a false alarm. If you or someone alone in your home cannot answer the phone, an emergency response team is sent to your address.

Pre-Existing Systems

If your home already has an alarm system, but it is not monitored, a good home security company can unlock the system and reprogram it to work for their monitoring station. Some home security companies will uninstall the system when the owner moves out, but some just abandon the equipment.

Testing Your System

If you want to test your system, you can inform the monitoring station that you plan to do a test. Then you activate an alarm and the monitoring center will tell you which signal they received, what part of the house it came from, and make sure your panel is sending proper communication signals.

If you accidentally set off a fire or burglar alarm, you’ll be called immediately by the monitoring station. You can tell them it was a false alarm.

Unmonitored burglar alarms may or may not scare away a burglar, just like a fire alarm may or may not wake you up in the middle of the night. Your best option for complete peace of mind is to have a monitored system.