Re: New House Alarm - Am I locked out?

[Nick Lawrence <nlaw@xxxxxxx>]

Jason...

The dealer is jerking you around/ The alarm community, not to mention
other consumers, need to know who they are.

What is the name and city of the dealer?

Before you take them to court, only small claims if they are lucky,
maybe they are known to the ASA community and will respond favorably to
a friendly phone call from someone here.

Or perhaps someone from Honeywell, makers of the First Alert
Professional product, will call them.

Nick



jasonextras@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Alright.  I called the monitoring company.  I'd call them out by name,
> but since the news is not good I think it might be wise to keep it to
> myself at this point.  According to them, the previous owner purchased
> and owns outright the entire system, including wiring, panels,
> keypads, and sensors.  They supposedly never rent or lease equipment,
> only sell it.  The company does, however, claim to own the programming
> of the unit itself and will under no circumstances allow the unit to
> function locally.  Not even if I pay for a tech to come out and make
> the necessary changes to the unit.  Nor will they provide the
> installer code to allow me to reset the unit to default values (which
> I checked and am locked out of).  How they are allowed to disable a
> functional alarm system that they do not own is beyond me.  If they
> want to wipe the programming since they claim they own it fine, but
> they won't even allow me to reprogram my own unit.  I got a supervisor
> involved, but they wouldn't budge.
>
> It sounds like my options are limited at this point.  I don't think I
> should have to buy a new panel, but it looks like I may have to.
>
> As far as the smoke detectors go, it appears they are wired in through
> the 110V system (I looked at this previously), but I can't be sure.
> They are First Alert detectors, and the system itself has fire
> monitoring capabilities, but I have no idea if the detectors are wired
> through the security system because the system does not work at all.
> The wires appear to go back towards the security system's mounting
> box, but there's insulation behind foil there and I can't trace their
> route.  Is there a way for me to find out for sure if they'll function
> without the alarm system enabled?
>