I just bought a house and wanted to see what the best home alarm system would be. I'm on a budget so I'm not looking for anything fancy. Anyone with stories/experience let me know. Thanks
I use Brinks, but my house was already wired with a system when I bought it. Do not use ADT. That's what my system was when I bought the house. I tried using them. Their customer service sucked and they installed a leaky battery in my system. Left battery acid stains on the floor of one of my closets. Brinks came in, ripped out the ADT system, and installed a Brinks system. Great customer service. Monitoring costs $100 every 3 months ($400 for the year).
My house was pre-wired and had the system in already as well (dont recall the brand) but I got the monitoring service from Time Warner ... now Comcast. I believe its $20/month
i have Brinks too. and did have an interesting situation a couple of weeks ago. the alarm has never gone off the 2 months i've had it. one night around 2:30 am, the alarm is wailing. of course, my first thought was, "holy ****, this isn't happening." i was getting ready to either scare the burglars or get killed. then, after a few seconds i realized my dog was never barking before the alarm. his bark usually means there's something or someone near the house. i started to calm down and cautiously walked toward the doors and check around the house. it turned out that i didn't close door all the way, and apparently the wind had blown it open enough for the alarm to go off. the weird thing is, it happened again about 9 pm a couple of nights later. i was starting to think i was losing my mind. now, i usually double check to make sure i closed it all the way.
$100 every three months, so I guess it would be $33.33 a month. They didn't charge me anything for installation, but I think that was because there was an ADT system already installed and they could just use the wiring. They are definitely worth a phone call.
Very satisfied with Brinks. A raccoon in my attic ruined the wiring done by my previous, small timey, alarm company. When they did a halfway job of fixing it, we called Brinks and they wired it from scratch. BTW, everyone I talked to before making a switch told me to avoid ADT.