Monitoring station
By default, all notifications from your alarm system arrive on your own smartphone, and possibly the phones of your housemates or family. Based on the received notifications, you take action yourself, such as calling the police.
If you are not able to respond to burglary alarms yourself, and neither are your housemates or other family members, it may be interesting to pay a monthly fee for an alarm centre.
A monitoring station responds to almost every report. We say almost, because there are rules about when a monitoring station can call the police. So always make written agreements with the monitoring station if you choose this option.
Often, an alarm system representative makes the connection of the monitoring station look better than it really is in order to gain extra commission, and it turns out afterwards that the police are not called immediately when an alarm is triggered.
So always make clear agreements directly with the alarm centre so as not to find out only when it is too late. You will often see that a standard control room contract does not include a direct police follow-up. So be warned!
Is the alarm centre of interest to you?
The need for an incident room depends very much on your profession and ability to cope. As long as someone can respond to incoming calls himself, the need is less and even slower to respond. If you receive the alert on your smartphone and you see someone on the camera who doesn’t belong there, you immediately call the police yourself. That’s fast, and the police give it priority 1 status.
Know what an incident room does if your alarm goes off.
There are various rules about how an incident room should respond to an alarm. By default, the owner is always called first.
If the monitoring station does not get through to the owner, it is important to know what the monitoring station’s response will be. Do they do nothing, or do they call the police? And does it matter if only one detector detected movement, or do several detectors have to go into alarm before the control room can call the police? These are all questions that need to be answered before you enter into a long-term contract.
There are also often additional conditions linked to the monitoring station subscription in the form of a maintenance contract for your system. The monitoring station does not want to receive unnecessary notifications about system maintenance that needs to be carried out, and therefore a maintenance contract with an installer is often mandatory.
So decide if two extra subscriptions, often for three years, are worth it to be called by an alarm centre in case of a burglary.