Re: Can an alarm with PGM outputs, and/or other outputs, be wired to an X10 sensor?

[anonymous <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Crash Gordon wrote:
> Thats even worse.
>
> In most states it's not permitted for a voice dialer to directly call the
> authorities.

The idea is that the user programs the machine to phone neighbours and
nearby friends and family, not the authorities directly. The idea is
that they can take a look from the street and phone the police if they
see signs of trouble. If a door is hanging off the frame, or a window is
smashed, or if they see someone unusal walking around inside they can
phone the police.

> We we are you have to have a permit for local AND monitored alarms, which
> means if your neighbor calls the police because he hears your siren go off
> (even if you happen to be testing the local siren) and the police are
> dispatched you're liable for false alarm assessment.

Good to know. This would be frustrating to alarm owners, I think; I at
least would not want to be held responsible for my neighbours'
misjudgements.

> I wouldn't trust anything on X10.

Ok.

> So...lets say your voice dialer tries several times to reach the first three
> numbers and fails, then finally reaches you on the phone, then you run to
> your nearest internet connection, log-in view your webcam?...and what...call
> the police 20 minutes after the fact?

If no one is answering the phone for those four numbers, I suppose it
will have to try for 20 minutes or more to get a message through. That
is of course a real limitation of the system, the price to be paid for
the advantage of not paying monthly fees to an alarm company. If one has
both a monitored alarm and a voice dialer alarm, I guess one gets the
best of both worlds. Then on the one hand, neighbors can see things that
the remote alarm monitoring company cannot and thereby sometimes make a
more informed judgement about whether to call the police; on the other
hand, it is very nice to have a monitoring company taking immediate
action on your behalf through the phone line and/or (in some cases) a
speaker on the keypad.


> "anonymous" <nospam@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
> news:12ua5ln22tdmdb9@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> | Crash Gordon wrote:
> | > Oye.
> | > The few bucks you "may" save will be spent on false alarm fines.

If the user does not program his system to phone the police
automatically, and the neighbors have some common sense (everyone has to
test alarms sometimes, right?), then it seems to me that there should be
no false alarm fines caused by this system.

> | The X10 thing doesn't automatically phone the police; it phones four
> | numbers of your choosing with a message that you set. Then you can
> | listen into what's happening through the microphone in the console, and
> | if you have a webcam or similar setup you can check the images on the
> | web or in e-mail to see what's going on. If you see or hear an intruder,
> | you can call the police.
>

Oops, I said that already. Well, thanks for writing.