Recommendation for alarm for new house?

[Salvadore]

Alarm companies used to operate a system for certain customers whereby the alarm sounders were delayed for a period of time after the alarm activation. The idea was that when the sounders activated the intruders would run out of the building into the arms of the awaiting Gardai. I don't know if this facility is still offered but the chances of a timely Garda response is so unlikely that this strategy would probably be useless in present day Ireland.

I don’t know whether that’s in the homeowners’ best interests.

It might give the Gardai more opportunity to catch the culprits but it also gives the culprits more time to trash your house.

 

[DavidQ]

Stay well clear of Phonewatch anyway. Misleading practices. We were loyal customers for over 7 years and decided to close our account to sign up with a much cheaper and better company. We rang them to notify them of closing our account and gave them one months notice as per our signing up terms. They took great delight in telling us that we would be invoiced for one years alarm monitoring as contracts had since changed. We had not signed up to any new contracts nor did we enter rolling yearly contracts. We emailed them to explain the situation and they’ve since just sent legal emails and debt collector threats demanding that we should pay the full years invoice. Also bear in mind our new alarm installer disabled and removed their system and it took their ‘live monitoring’ centre over two hours to phone us to say there was an issue with the intruder alarm. Dreadful service, approach and company. Absolutely do not sign up to them and if you’re with them you should cancel and absolutely do not pay any fees past one months notice. There are so many better companies out there with far cheaper setup and monthly monitoring fees, that actually offer ‘live’ monitoring to protect your home or business.