In order to save your money on home security monitoring service, one thing that you can do is to look for inexpensive monitoring companies because each company provides different type of products and services. Before you start to choose any monitoring company that you wanted to use, you should prepare questionnaires such as whether they provide protection with a 24-hour and 7 days a week kind of services, whether their staff have the experience or well-trained, do they provide back up system in case of emergency, whether or not they charge you on the installation fees, are the company certified by right agency for instance the National Burglar & Fire Alarm Association or whether they provide any services relating to Wireless Burglar Alarms. All of these sample questionnaires will be able to help you in saving on expenses when you want to use a home security monitoring service.
What you need to do:
- Define your needs rather than what you like to have for monitoring services
- Check whether your existing system uses carbon monoxide, fire/smoke or water sensors
- Try to use features that you already have like email notification, system control through cellular phone or even via the internet.
Home Security Monitoring
Method:
- First of all, you need to verify the suitable monitoring service company that would be able to support any of your home security system. Do not succumb to their suggestion in replacing your existing security system with their products. You should also define and understand the need for you to have the monitoring services rather than wanting what you like to have.
- If you are using carbon monoxide, fire/smoke or water sensors, you should know in advance that there will always be additional monthly fees for this type of system. You need to be clear and sure that the sensors that you are using are not the ones that fall under the additional fees category in order to monitor them through monitoring services.
- For those of you who wanted to use a VoIP home phone, you should also verify whether the monitoring company would be able to receive alarms without the use of landline phone. In order to use this type of system, you can also use a broadband alarm adapter which is available in the market. Apart from that, there is also another option of using cellular or radio monitoring that can be set as your primary notification or even use it for backup purpose.
- You should also check on convenient features that will help you reduce on the cost of using monitoring service company for instance the usage of email notification and controlling of the security system by using cellular phone or internet connectivity.
- Verify with the home security monitoring service company whether they require long-term contracts or not. Besides that, you need their confirmation also on whether they have cancellation fees or not because this is another area where you can reduce on the cost of system.
- If the home security system that you install is still new, you should just continue to use the system for a while and get familiarize with it in order to lessen any false alarms that might happen and also enable you to learn the system much better.
- Whenever you choose to use broadband services for activating your alarm notification, you must always remember that if your broadband connection is not good for instance it is having communication problems, power failure or unable to be connected, the monitoring company that you hire will not be able to know of any alarm condition that has been triggered during the period.
Additional Reading:
Home Security! How to Keep Your Home and Family Safe from Crime
