I am about to replace an old alarm system and want to upgrade it. One specific desire is to implement alarm verification, which the old alarm system never had. I live in an area where for the police to now respond to an alarm requires either a person in situ confirming an event, a person such as the home owner remotely observing an intruder and notifying police or an audio or video confirmation by the alarm monitoring company who then notify authorities of a confirmed alarm.
My current thinking is as follows:
For reference I will likely replace my current alarm system with a Honeywell Vista system (more of that in a separate thread) but to keep this thread of more general interest and in order to not exclude potentially more desirable options please assume any DIY solution is on the table at this time.
Thanks
John
My current thinking is as follows:
- I cannot rely on a neighbor or passer-by reporting, so alarm confirmation comes down to audio and/or video feedback of an alarm.
- It is not practical to rely on me receiving notification of the alarm by phone, then viewing video clips from a camera system I install and then contacting the police department. There are just too many ways for this to fail and/or take too long to be practical. I do plan to have cameras I can use to remotely observe and log video events, just not rely on me monitoring them for alarm confirmation.
- Audio only confirmation doesn't seem to be a very robust method, whether that is just hoping to hear noises of entry/movement or relying on glass break detection, so this leaves video confirmation.
For reference I will likely replace my current alarm system with a Honeywell Vista system (more of that in a separate thread) but to keep this thread of more general interest and in order to not exclude potentially more desirable options please assume any DIY solution is on the table at this time.
Thanks
John