Choosing an alarm system for your home

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.

If you do not want to rely on your neighbours, you can pay extra to have your alarm monitored, so that you or another member of your household is called whenever your alarm goes off.

Most monitoring companies require you to have a maintenance contract for your alarm in place, in order to minimise false alarms. While this option can prove to be rather pricey, if you have a lot of high value items in your home, or do not have any immediate neighbours, it could be a price worth paying. Expect to pay between seventy and a hundred and eighty pounds per year for a monitoring service, not including maintenance.

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.

Installing such a system is no guarantee that the police will respond to your alarms in time, however, as the speed of their response will depend entirely on what else is happening at the time, and the resources they have at their disposal. You will need to keep your alarm in tip top shape as well, as if the police receive more than three or four false alarms from your property in a year, they will stop responding to them. A police response system can cost upwards of 280GBP per year plus a 45GBP registration fee.

An automatic speech dialler 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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