3 Essential Questions To Ask Before Choosing An Alarm System For Your Home

Do you feel concerned about the safety of your home? Have you been thinking about having an alarm installed, but you're not sure which system you want to go with? For peace of mind, few things beat having an alarm system installed in your home. But if you've never had one before, the array of available options can be dizzying. Fortunately, you can narrow down the choices to the best one for you by asking a few simple questions. Some of the most important questions to ask include:

What is included in the system?

A modern alarm system often has a front-door camera, though not always. It typically monitors at least the front and back door of your home and possibly the garage. Additional monitoring locations or zones may cost more, adding to your additional expense, but this may be all that you feel that you need. If you would feel safer with additional cameras or with an alarm on each of your windows, these are things that you need to be sure of before you choose a system because adding additions to some systems will be less expensive than with others.

What happens in a power outage?

A power outage can be an ideal situation for a burglar to take advantage of. Without power, a basic alarm system will do absolutely nothing because it has no electricity to detect any issues. Fortunately, you can also find more advanced systems that have a battery backup. While these won't run forever without power, a battery backup should provide at least a few extra hours of coverage, giving you more peace of mind while the power company works to restore electricity to your home. Even if blackouts aren't especially common in your area, you might want to consider investing in a battery backup for your system for the additional protection that it provides just in case.

What happens during a break-in?

In extremely cheap systems, nothing may happen except a loud noise playing. This may deter some burglars but not others. What you want is an alarm system that actually notifies someone that a break-in has occurred. This is what a monthly monitoring fee is for. But not all monitoring services are created equal. Some of them will call you and only you in the event that an alarm is going off, which isn't useful if your phone is off or you're on vacation. You want to make sure that the monitoring company will escalate to calling the police when they are notified of a possible break-in occurrence.