Anyone build a alarm and get a monitoring company to monitor it (over the internet) ?
1 Like
Maybe you could give a little bit more detail on what you are after?
Ive put together a unit that does access control and acts as an alarm with motion sensors and door contacts right now I'm using twitter to monitor it ... but I was thinking It would be nice if I could get an actual alarm company to watch it and was wondering if anyone has done that yet
I did not do this. But before you go to a monitoring company you might want to think about the cost of false positives. If you want to get an idea of what might go wrong have a look at this classic: Security Engineering - A Guide to Building Dependable Distributed Systems.
Generally, the alarm companies are set up to communicate with specific hardware that they provide and install. I would be very surprised if any were prepared to do anything with unfamiliar hardware, let alone a home built setup.
@Udo Klein Thanks for the like I'm looking at it now, I've been running the alarm for a couple of months now and haven't really seen any false alarms. I'm going to read this but if you have an quick pointers to look at that would be great.
@wildbill I used to work for a local AV company and we sold a couple different alarms over the years (GE, Ademco, Etc .. ) and always used the same monitoring company, most of the monitoring companies (especially now with IP monitoring) use one of a couple standards to talk between the alarm and the monitoring station (Contact ID, FSK databurst, ademco 9+1, again Etc ...)
I was just wondering if anyone has dealt with that ... I have a call in to a couple of the national monitoring companys (all which only deal with dealers) and criticom said that they would probably do it if I could find a dealer to be the in between but they won't release the connection details unless your a dealer