Please register to participate in our discussions with 2 million other members - it's free and quick! Some forums can only be seen by registered members. After you create your account, you'll be able to customize options and access all our 15,000 new posts/day with fewer ads.
Does Alarm Man charge for installation? So what is the break even point btw choosing the local company vs large company that installs it for free but higher monthly monitoring.
Does Alarm Man charge for installation? So what is the break even point btw choosing the local company vs large company that installs it for free but higher monthly monitoring.
Yes, they charge. I've no idea what the "breakeven" is because I didn't calculate it. It wasn't a factor because my bigger priority was NO CONTRACT. The cost of installation, considering the amount of work and time involved, seemed reasonable to me.
The hardware Alarm Man uses is Honeywell, the same as ADT and the other national brands. Most techy people (even outside the security industry) claim that the hardware is a better quality than SimplySafe.
The additional thing that Alarm Man did for us was eliminating duplicate measures. Motion detectors and glass break alarms took the place of window alarms, covering the exact same area. We would never have spotted these redundancies if we had gone with self-alarm, and all the other quotes we received included the redundant alarms.
That's why I'm not a huge fan of wireless security systems...mine is all hard wired.
Agreed. When you meet with the Alarm man people, they highly recommend a wired system that still communicates by cellular to the central station. ADT, CPI and others have no installation costs, because they just come in and stick wireless equipment all over your house. Then you have to call them periodically to replace the wireless batteries every now and then so it's even more of a cost. Alarm Man wires the entire system inside the house.
Alarm Man installation was not more than $100. Alarm man for us, was consistently more than $10 cheaper per month, so the break-even point didn't take that long.
I wish I could have a wired system, but I ended up going with SimpliSafe. The monitoring service folks have been great the couple times I had a fire alarm go off, and overall I'm very happy with the product. That said, the hack mentioned above is a concern**, and while their current product works well, the company is very unresponsive to customer requests/product suggestions, and still hasn't released the security camera that they've been 'working on' for years.
** though realistically, the risk of this attack is likely very low, and I'm sure all systems have some flaw; the SimpliSafe was just easy to get hands on to reverse engineer, and they made some poor security choices. I'm probably going to put up yard security signs from a different company instead of my Simplisafe signs just to be cautious.
Agreed. When you meet with the Alarm man people, they highly recommend a wired system that still communicates by cellular to the central station. ADT, CPI and others have no installation costs, because they just come in and stick wireless equipment all over your house. Then you have to call them periodically to replace the wireless batteries every now and then so it's even more of a cost. Alarm Man wires the entire system inside the house.
Alarm Man installation was not more than $100. Alarm man for us, was consistently more than $10 cheaper per month, so the break-even point didn't take that long.
Umm, in 2013 CPI and Alarm Man offered us wired and wireless systems. Alarm Man did a wireless install for us (which was our preference ) except for the outdoor siren and the smoke alarm. Those needed to be wired.
Please register to post and access all features of our very popular forum. It is free and quick. Over $68,000 in prizes has already been given out to active posters on our forum. Additional giveaways are planned.
Detailed information about all U.S. cities, counties, and zip codes on our site: City-data.com.