Thoughts on alarm/entry - garage vs. house

[tgraham]

Need insight on how to best implement the whole house security system and what others are doing. I have installed sensors on all doors including the garage doors. Should the garage doors be ignored as far as burgular type if the alarm is armed away? The scenerio I'm trying to figure out is door is opened, the car drives in and parks. Obviously this has now triggred the alarm so the countdown to disarm has begun. My concern is the need to immediately go into the house to disarm, especially when it's my wife and she's getting our son out of the car, unloading stuff, etc. An easy solution would be a wireless keyfob and easy since I've already got the Caddx module in place. With a rotating light indicating the status it be pretty easy and high on the WAF.

Alternatively, seems the best scenerio would be to have the door alarms set for monitoring of open close status so I can check them and close via the relay's if necessary but not part of the intrustion detection. Since they are on openers it'd be pretty hard to force them open. I do have an additional sensor on the side entry door so opening that would trigger the alarm and work fine. But, I also wanted to utilize the garage motion sensor for triggering when away/armed and that would trigger immmediately and put me back in the same position as initially.

Todd

 

[remoteshoppe]

I do not have sensors on the garage doors themselves but on the entrance door from the garage to the house. this gives the Mrs. plenty of time to unload the kids, groceries, or whatever without triggering the alarm until someone has actually entered the house. I do plan on adding sensors to the garage doors but only to tell me if they've been inadvertently left open.

 

[tgraham]

Yes, I have a sensor on the door that leads from the garage to the house and that works fine as burgular instant type. But, w/o something monitoring the actual garage status someone could come clean it out and not trip the alarm.

 

[Steve]

Monitoring the garage itself is tricky because you would have to account for any number of situations where it might be you in the garage. I don't know stats but as you said, the actual garage door itself is not very likely a point of entry. I have contacts on the side garage door, door from garage to house and even on the pulldown entry to the attic in the garage. These are all tied into security. The sensor on the garage door itself is only used for status and the door is controllable via a relay.

 

[dscline]

I don't know what type of system you have, but at least on the Elk, you have the ability to configure two different entry delay times. You could set up a longer delay time to be used for the garage door, allowing plenty of time to get in the house and turn off the alarm. However, if you DO have the Elk, it at least appears that there may currently be an issue with one zone erroneously triggering another zone. So there could be a risk that triggering the garage zone could trigger another lower delay zone, putting your back where you started.

 

[elcano]

If you definitively want to include your garage in the burglar coverage your safest bet and cleanest way to go is to use the wireless keyfobs. They are very nice anyway. Since they provide 6 actions (one per button plus two 2-buttons combinations) you can even use the keyfob to control the garage door at the same time.

 

[bfisher]

I monitor my garage doors - but if an intrusion is detected (alarm is armed in exit mode - and door goes up) - it starts a 5 minute timer in my HVPro. If the alarm isn't turned off before the timer expires - it pages my mobile phone.

Not a perfect solution - but it helps...