Just looking for a little feedback from you guys regarding home security. Me and the wife are looking into ADT for a home security system. We are away from home quite a bit, so I think it would be nice to have something “just in case”.

Has anyone dealt with ADT before? How was it?

Does you home owners insurance rate go down at all??


Just looking for a little insight from everyone.

We have ADT. It reduced our insurance by about 12%....they claimed 15%, but that varies with each company.

I have no complaints. They have called me when a battery is low & they got a code. They called me when a sensor went bad from corrosion.

The times the alarm went off, they called quickly. I wasn't home & they called both cell phones & my neighbor I had listed & the police!

No one has actually broke into our home.

Family member came in without disarming & set of the alarm.

We had another company at first.... they NEVER called, even when the alarm went off! They seem to just collect the monthly fees for nothing!

We plan to take ours with us to TX if the house there doesn't have one!

With an extra module you can use it with your homelink in your Honda!:thmsup:

We have ADT. It reduced our insurance by about 12%....they claimed 15%, but that varies with each company.

I have no complaints. They have called me when a battery is low & they got a code. They called me when a sensor went bad from corrosion.

The times the alarm went off, they called quickly. I wasn't home & they called both cell phones & my neighbor I had listed & the police!

No one has actually broke into our home.

Family member came in without disarming & set of the alarm.

We had another company at first.... they NEVER called, even when the alarm went off! They seem to just collect the monthly fees for nothing!

We plan to take ours with us to TX if the house there doesn't have one!

With an extra module you can use it with your homelink in your Honda!:thmsup:


Do you have the remotes Princess?

I was checking out their website, and it showed "remote" access....I wonder how you would know the alarm is "activated" or not...

We have one in the Ridgeline. It's not home now. I'll see if I can get you some answers.

The homelink link doesn't reach through all the walls to the other side of the house very well. It will only work with the truck parked WAY over there sometimes. So he carries the remote for the house alarm in there. He linked the homelink to his lights on that side of the house instead. Then both cars open the garage door. I don't know what his 3rd one does.....:dunno: (we needed 2 for arming & disarming the house)

It may have a light on it.....:dunno:

I once worked for Protection One as an alarm dispatcher. (The guy who calls you when something's wrong, and calls the police dispatcher if boots on the ground are needed.) Stressful job.

Anyway, I'd say any alarm company is pretty much the same, as long as it's a major name. Brinks, ADT, Pro-1... they'll all do a good job. Just make sure you get a decent system and set up your account's instructions the way you want. (In some areas the police charge for showing up at a false alarm, so you may want a "do not dispatch without consent" instruction or something like that.)

Accidentally set the alarm off once just to have a dispatcher call you, then talk with them for a little bit about tweaking your call list and so forth (they're the ones who know about the dispatch side - the installer won't know the first thing about it.)


Personally, we don't have an alarm. Partly because we're renting, but mostly because there aren't many times no one is home, and we've got high-velocity home protection...

+1 for ADT!!!

theres multiple ways to control the system, we use to have it controlled with the home phones, but now we have keypads

as for remote access, you can turn your alarm on and off via the phone if you enable it

Did those of you who have had a security system, did you get alot of false alarms???

Did those of you who have had a security system, did you get alot of false alarms???

From my experience making thousands of calls for false alarms here's what most of them are:

Motion detectors. They may have gotten better at making them now, but those things are damn picky about everything. The battery goes low... they start throwing off false alarms. God forbid you have a dog or cat - they can be set to - supposedly - not go off for a dog or cat, but 9 times out of ten when we'd get a motion sensor tripping over and over it'd be someone's pet setting it off. My advice is not to have them put in if you have pets.

Low system batteries. The logic in the alarm system (depending on brand) can get really hinky if the system batteries are low. Add in a power outage (or some idiot who yanks the plug - that's screwed in securely to the socket - out) and the system can sometimes just go nuts.

Someone who's allowed to be there but hasn't been told how to work the alarm properly. Visiting friends or family are always setting off alarms, and what's worse they generally don't know the password for the alarm company when they call, so the cops get called. (Because the whole password thing is meant to distinguish home owners from burglars.)

Old people. For the love of god, if you can't set a VCR please don't get an alarm. If I had a dollar for every minute I spent on the phone with some 80-year old woman trying to explain to her what the difference was between the "Home" setting and the "Away" setting... (which determines whether the motion sensor is active).


You're going to have false alarms - that's just kind of a given. Sooner or later, everyone accidentally trips the alarm (usually sooner, since you're not used to being deafened simply because you didn't push a few buttons before you opened the door.)

But most of them can be avoided simply by making sure the system stays in proper working order, and that it was properly installed to begin with. (Door and window sensors, as well as motion sensors, can throw off lots of false alarms in storms and such if they aren't set up right.)

When our batteries were low ADT called us BEFORE any alarms were triggered!!:thmsup:

It's been in the the person was allowed to be here, but didn't remember the alarm was set......

We had 2 alarms for that reason. The city made us pay 30 dollars the second time since it was close to the first one.

A few months ago the smoke/fire alarm went off..... my daughter was making cookies & for some reason the house filled with smoke. The fire dept. dispatch laughed when I explained that the daughter was making cookies. The humor went away when it happened again 10 minutes later. We turned on the whole house fan until she was finished. :paranoid:

It worked exactly like it was supposed to.

We haven't had much chance to use it in the past year. Someone's always home.

We didn't bother with the window sensors. I use sticks & window locks. At night in the Summer we also sometimes leave the sliding doors open 3" with a stick to keep them from opening any more than that. Low tech, but it works.

Ours is set up for the security screen door in front, garage door to the backyard, back slider, bedroom slider & motion aimed so you can't go into the kitchen or down the hallway without setting it off.

We haven't had a problem!

When our batteries were low ADT called us BEFORE any alarms were triggered!!:thmsup:

Pro-1 did that when I was hired, then they combined the monitoring of two regions into one regional call center (mine) in order to boost profits. The number of alarms doubled, tripled, and then became (quite literally) uncountable by the computers in 2 days, because we couldn't get through them fast enough. So the executive decision was to completely ignore all non-emergency alarm signals. They got shut off at the computers that processed the incoming signals. (I forget what they were called.)

It was a hugely stupid step, if you ask me.

So yeah, double-check whether they monitor that stuff and call you about it. (Your alarm system can blab about all kinds of things you wouldn't think about - it will tell them if the power goes out, for instance.)

Another good idea: check out what kind of battery the various systems use. They generally last for years (but check on that) but some of them cost a hundred dollars or more. (You can usually find them much cheaper through a battery store than what the alarm company will charge you if you let them supply it.)

A few months ago the smoke/fire alarm went off..... my daughter was making cookies & for some reason the house filled with smoke. The fire dept. dispatch laughed when I explained that the daughter was making cookies. The humor went away when it happened again 10 minutes later. We turned on the whole house fan until she was finished. :paranoid:

It worked exactly like it was supposed to.

The cops are generally pretty good-natured about false alarms. They don't like them because they feel it wastes their time, but they won't break down the door if they can't get in.

The fire department... much smaller sense of humor.

If you get a fire system monitored, consider possibly instructing the alarm company not to dispatch the fire department unless they can't get ahold of anyone on your call list, or something similar. Fire response is expensive even if they don't break down your door.

We didn't bother with the window sensors. I use sticks & window locks. At night in the Summer we also sometimes leave the sliding doors open 3" with a stick to keep them from opening any more than that. Low tech, but it works.

This is the smart way to go, in my opinion. (Unless you keep a lot of valuables in the house.) The idea isn't to make it impossible to break into your house - that can't be done. You want to make it really "effing" annoying to break into your house. That way, they start thinking to themselves "why don't I just find an easier place to steal from?"

Glass break sensors, depending on their style, can be a nice way to protect a series of barred/locked windows if you need extra security. (They have sensors that listen for the sound of breaking glass - they can cover a large area depending on placement.) Individual "foil" type sensors cover just one window, but are less prone to false alarms.

Don't forget the second floor, but don't break the bank guarding it either, unless the house is likely to be broken into. If the second floor is a major pain to get to from the outside (no convenient ladders around to be borrowed), and the first floor is reasonably secure, you can be pretty certain a would-be thief will just look for easier pickings.

Think about it - car thieves will steal six-figure cars with state of the art alarms. You can't stop them if they're determined.

But if two similar cars are parked in the same lot, one with an armed alarm and the other running with the keys in it... which gets stolen?

As a quick side note: I lived in one of those "sliding scale" apartment complexes in a rough neighborhood about 10 years ago. Lots of people got broken into around there.

I put a silhouette shooting range target on my front door with about 50 rounds through center mass and a nice bright red sheet of construction paper behind the holes. At the bottom I hand wrote, "Steal here, Die here".

I was never burglarized.

"I put a silhouette shooting range target on my front door with about 50 rounds through center mass and a nice bright red sheet of construction paper behind the holes. At the bottom I hand wrote, "Steal here, Die here"."

:lmao::lmao::lmao::lmao::lmao::lmao::lmao:

Our first company didn't even call when one of the kid's ex's broke in & the alarms went off.:dunno: It was Alarm One. They are who did the install & most of also had to be redone.

We've been pleased with ADT. :)

My house has an alarm system by ADT, but it is not monitored or even active.

My friend and his wife in Los Angeles had an ADT monitored system, but someone broke into their house and stole a lot of stuff including their fireproof safe with their wedding cash gifts.

So that kinda makes me afraid to get an ADT system.

Of course YMMV.