Online Financial Tips

Article by Steve Nutt

As a DIY enthusiast you may have installed your own burglar alarm system. You probably wired up all your detectors and connected your panel to the electric – confident that if any burglars were to enter your property they would be detected and a siren would scare them off. If you want to take things one step further and have your system monitored by professional operators at an alarm monitoring center then this article is for you.

Perhaps the most difficult thing you will have to do is find a monitoring center that will deal with a DIYer directly. While there are a limited number of companies that will agree to do this, an Internet search for “DIY Alarm Monitoring” or similar should return enough results for you to find one of them.

As far as physical connections go, the only thing you need to do is connect your alarm panel to the telephone line in such a way that it is able to seize the line when it needs to dial the monitoring center. Your panel manual should provide technical instructions on how to do this.

The next step is for you to program your panel’s alarm monitoring settings. The terminology varies between different makes of alarm panel, so the following guidelines use generic terms:

In many alarm panels you have an option to “Enable Communications” and this is perhaps the single most important setting.

The next step is for you and your chosen alarm monitoring company to agree on an alarm protocol – also referred to as an alarm format. There are three groups of alarm formats – Pulse, FSK and DTMF. Unless there are very good reasons to do so, you should not choose a Pulse format as it can take up to 30 seconds for a single alarm signal to reach the alarm receiver at the Monitoring Center. The SIA format is an FSK protocol and is much faster at around 10 seconds for the first signal and around two seconds for subsequent signals, however, the most popular by far is Ademco Contact ID, which is a DTMF protocol.

Where Contact ID is selected, your alarm panel modem dials the phone number of an alarm receiver at the Monitoring Center, which answers the call and then receives a group of 16 DTMF tones over the telephone line. The protocol dictates what each of the digits mean and the Monitoring Center will have custom alarm monitoring software to decode each signal according to the protocol.

Program your panel to use the alarm protocol (format) agreed with your monitoring provider.

Program the primary and secondary receiver telephone numbers provided by your monitoring provider.

Program the Account Number allocated to you by the alarm monitoring provider as this will be used to uniquely identify your panel in the automation software system.

The above settings should be all that’s required to get your alarm panel sending signals to the receiver at the monitoring center in most cases, however, your panel may have many more options that could be important to the way you want your panel to perform in the event of a burglary. Take the time to read the manual in detail and seek the help of your monitoring provider if you are unsure of the consequences of changing any of the settings from their default values.

Thoroughly test your wiring and new settings by sending several alarm signals to the monitoring center and verify that each one was received correctly. One final piece of advice would be to program your alarm panel to send a periodic test signal at least once a month to ensure that your system is in working order.

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