Alarm Force not work
Put in a new alarm system and it works great, we’ve set it off a few times on purpose just to see…ha Our batteries have a 4-5 year life and we can replace all of them ourselves. Great customer service too. Alarm Force is nothing but old equipment that doesn’t work half of the time and that you are responsible for testing once a month or so they say. They put our box in the cupboard, we could hardly hear it! The techs installing our new system looked at us like we were nuts when we asked them how often we should be testing..a good alarm system will let you know via keyboard when a sensor battery is low.. Alarm Force never did, just stopped working and one of our door sensors never worked no matter what we did to it. The charge for them to come and look at it was crazy so we just left it and put our 130-pound Rottweiler and his bed there instead. Alarm Force is not very pet-friendly either. In general I am not a tech geek or anything but this alarm system is a bunch of crap and a ripoff. I would not recommend it to anyone! I only remain anonymous ’cause I don’t have a google account, I would gladly give my name…
Another Alarm Company
Alarm Force customer for 7 years now. ADT for 3 years prior, Brinks home security 2 years before that, and Monotronics 1 year before that. Let me just say that these are some nice fish stories.
The battery in the main box is a backup battery which is used when your power is out. Eventually with power outages, surges or any flickers in your electricity it will drain just like any other backup battery. $100 charge, that’s a big fish. Mine cost $20.24 after tax. That was 4 years after having the system. I was told about the batteries in the sensors prior to installation. They recommend changing them once a year. How hard is that. Yes if you can’t change your own batteries they are going to charge you. The cost of the batteries is a little higher than retail. That’s the point, they can’t do it at retail or the poor guy who is doing it isn’t getting paid then. Go with ADT and get a wired system. No battery changes, but heaven forbid you need service there. ADT $35 an hour and $20 every 15 mins. after. I would much rather pay a guy $25-$30 to change the batteries that I am just too damn lazy to do myself.
As far as the two way. It’s not crystal clear, however I am not making my phone calls from the box. The point is to let who ever is in your home know, we know your there and the police are on the way. It is not a recorded voice, unless the 15 times I have accidentally set mine off in the past 7 years has just happened to be a different recorded voice each time that happened to sound just like the operator I was speaking to. Yeah if the intruder is quiet they won’t hear them, but guess what moron, if they don’t hear YOU it’s obviously not you in the house.
I won’t even mention the 4 times I have been broken into. The first I had ADT. They didn’t even know anything happened and that was that. The past 3 times over 7 years, yeah that’s a lot and apparenlty people want my stuff. Guess what, 1 break in with ADT cost me over $6000 in loss and damages, they were there a while while I was on vacation. Not to mention the over $350 in service charges from ADT to check and fix my system which didn’t work. 3 Break ins with Alarm Force have cost me $500 total and that was to fix a broken window on #1 Broken Sliding door on #2 and a door frame on #3. Hmmmm who’s the winner.
Go with another alarm company and see how quickly the awww of the bells and whistles wears off. I was there. The grass is always greener on the other side. You people are all stupid and are the same people who would sue McDonalds when you spill your hot coffee on yourself. Does the cup really need to say HOT…..It’s F’in coffee.
Alarm Force Crap
Whether or not the Alarm Force “panel” was at fault, fact of the matter is, Alarm Force is crap. The Alarm Force system consists of a shoebox sized plastic box with a tiny transistor radio sized speaker mounted right next to the microphone. This box is usually placed on the kitchen counter and plugged into the phone line and power there.
As for the “$100″ battery, this is a tiny $5 battery (at most). Alarm Force is NOT a service company. Their whole purpose is to obtain as many monitoring contracts as possible. With that much emphasis on sales and “alarm systems” which require little or no installation skill it is no wonder Alarm Force customers have problems getting service.
Nomore Alarm Force
NOT Alarm Force anymore.
We have had Alarm Force for 10 years and now we are going away from it due to their one-man service. “Free”is good until you have a problem. their system shorted the phone line ( relay locked open probably) and cooked the high speed modem ($79.95 plus tax) but the fellow refused to admit any problem, and insulted my friend the phone line fellow. then he said we should have been running a full test of the system every month. then he suggested over the phone a “hard reset” of the system. I wanted another unit; he didn’t want to do that and said again that “you can never be too sure with the phone system”
I’m going local with the ADT all in one price, and they have a line check they do every month for problems. AND no extra charges for battery service.
Alarm Force, the main unit, which they own, has to have the battery replaced $100 plus sooner or later, 3 or 4 years max.
If we were broken into would they say the system was not at fault because we didn’t test it every month?
There are problems getting calls back within 2 days, and I heard it cost one older lady $200 to have him come and check and replace her batteries throughout the house.
Certainly something similar I know of happened to my folks, $100 plus to check the batteries.
I’m not happy with service, a one man show.
Me? I’m an Electro-mechanical research gadget builder and know a little bit about this over the last 30 years, so to hear it passed off on the phone company again when I was there with the meter in my hand- well that’s just crap.