Active discussions

Meet the Other Phone. Flexible and made to last.

Meet the Other Phone.
Flexible and made to last.

Buy now

Please or to access all these features

Talk
AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

Original poster

to beleive that if your neighbours burglar alarm is going off for 92 mins (and yes I did fucking time it!) then I should be within my rights to throw stones, or fire a shotgun at the bloody thing

23 replies

Ormirian · 03/10/2011 19:19

until it lies shattered at my feet so I can jump and down on the bits?

Well am I?

In fact I am staunchly anti-death penalty but I think that at least an afternoon in the stocks should be the penalty for maliciously using a burglar alarm with intent to disturb my the peace. Ditto car alarms.

OP posts:
GwendolineMaryLacey · 03/10/2011 19:20

Only if I can do the same to the car alarm that went off every half hour for about 7 minutes at a time right through last night.

Original poster
Ormirian · 03/10/2011 19:21

Oh you can!

OP posts:
ggirl · 03/10/2011 19:21

arf
but was there someone rifling through your neighbours house whilst you were fuming?

slavetofilofax · 03/10/2011 19:22

Stones would be fair game, as long as not near a window. Shotgun is taking it a bit too far.

Maybe get a ladder and a big stick?

troisgarcons · 03/10/2011 19:23

Did you call the police though?

Original poster
Ormirian · 03/10/2011 19:27

No. I didn't. Because the owner was there - at least one of them was - but she didn't know how to switch it off!!

OP posts:
Twattingcuntybollocks · 03/10/2011 19:31

YANBU, one of our neighbours has an alarm that goes off intermittently throughout the week for what feel like hours at a time, mostly in the middle of the night. Then his poor dog barking in the garden all fucking day. I say poor dog because no wonder he barks all the time the only time he sees his owner is when he feeds him. He never walks him and I don't think he is ever let in the house Sad
It does my fucking nut it TBH, I have been known to scream out my window to STFU like a fishwife Blush

Twattingcuntybollocks · 03/10/2011 19:31

STFU to the owner not the dog Blush

KittyFane · 03/10/2011 19:31

Ooh was it me last week?!! My DH came home to fix it .
I was in the front room crying.

AchtungBaby · 03/10/2011 19:31

Actually, someone threw stones at our window and shouted at DH and I once because we lived in a flat above another flat whose burglar alarm was going off. It really scared us at the time Sad - we'd clearly told them that it wasn't our flat and that we'd tried to contact the landlord to get him to do something about it. We moved out not long afterwards.

LaWeasel · 03/10/2011 19:32

About 7/8years ago, my dad and I rang the police when one of our neighbours burglar alarm starting going off at 2am. The police said they wouldn't come out! We went round with a couple of walking sticks and made loads of noise and it turned off eventually...

Was bizarre though. What's the point of having an alarm if the police aren't going to turn up?

Original poster
Ormirian · 03/10/2011 20:06

You can get burglar alarms that send a signal to the police. Or you can get ones that just piss off the neighbours Hmm I think this was one of the latter.....

OP posts:
Original poster
Ormirian · 03/10/2011 20:09

And if it's one of the latter type I assume that the local residents are supposed to act on it. But when they go off pointlessly because a cat has hit the switch or because the power has had a wobble, local residents tend to jjust glower and mutter darkly.

I hate the damned things. My parents installed one. After they got burgled. And just before they got burgled the second time Hmm

OP posts:
5Foot5 · 03/10/2011 20:24

Was it going off continuously? 'Cos when we had ours fitted - at least 10 years ago - the man who installed it told us that there was a maximum time of 20 minutes that they were allowed to go on for. He configured ours to go on for no more than 5 minutes before it stopped as he said that was usually enough to scare off a burglar and alert anyone that something had happened. Also just because it had stopped it would still be set, so if an intruder was just standing really, really still or ran away and then returned it would go off again.

There was a spate of burglaries in our estate about 3 years back and it was noticeable that it was only the houses without alarms, our neighbours included, that were targetted. Since then I think every house has had them fitted.

Mind you I am a bit Shock at the owner who didn't know how to turn off her own alarm!!

Original poster
Ormirian · 03/10/2011 20:28

It was continuous. And very very loud! I had the windows open because of the heat.

And yes Iwas a bit Hmm that she didn't know how to switch it off. I confess I'm not sure about ours. We inherited it when we bought the house. But then we never switch it on.

OP posts:
PigfartsPigfartsHereICome · 03/10/2011 20:45

Eek, I feel even worse now. I got to school at 4 to pick up eldest charge, and got a call from my boss saying the house alarm was going off! He'd had a call from alarm company. Unfortunately there's no way of getting home quick so I had to grabed my charge and got home as soon as possible... got in at 5 and found it was off. So I hope it had been turned off remotely sooner rather than later, else it may have been on for two hours. There was just no way I could have gotten home quicker. I feel really guilty but something outside of my control.

ThoseArentSpiritFingers · 03/10/2011 21:40

Ive had that happen to me. There was a power cut on our whole block, and apparently we are the only ones that use our alarm and have it connected at all (have to as part of tennancy agreement).

Because the power was off for about an hour, I couldn't turn it Off as the keypad was completely dead, and I don't know where the mains switch or whatever was.

I was practically crying when my neighbour helpfully told me to put in my security code. Like I hadn't tried that already.... Hmm

In the end I left to go for a coffee because there was nothing I could do.

TheVermiciousKnid · 03/10/2011 21:50

YANBU. At all.

noyouhavehadawee · 03/10/2011 22:04

A couple of years back on a really really cold frosty night about 1am a house alarm went off, it was driving me mad so eventually i got out of bed to see who the annoying twit was and it was ours Shock which was odd because we had not even set it in months, entered code and it was still going off, dh pulled fuses out of the control box and it still was going off so he climbed intheloft accross to where wiring went to thebox and hacked through it with a carving knife - it was still going off. Next step dh in his undies wearing his boots climbed on the canopy above the ground floor armed with a broom and knocked the alarm box off the house onto the floor and shouted for me to get it (meanwhile despite living in a cul de sac with 30 houses nobody appears) - the alarm box bounced of next doors wall and i scupered down to retrieve it AND THE FUCKER WAS STILL GOING OFF so i ran back upstairs and wrapped our duvet round it and sat on it in our dining room till dh nearly slipped of the roof and came in with a hammer friends style and whacked it senseless. The kids never woke up, no neighbour came and knocked and me and dh laughed about it hysterically well into the morning. Sorry i just thought i would share how utterly useless it appears house alarms are.

noyouhavehadawee · 03/10/2011 22:05

YANBU BTW

PigletJohn · 03/10/2011 22:11

  1. Yes they are required to reset after 20 minutes but you can adjust them to turn off sooner. 10 mins is usually enough

  2. If you have one that sounds when there is a power cut (or blown fuse) it probably means that the standby battery in the control panel needs replacing, and there is another battery in the siren box

  3. If your neighbour's alarm sounds for over 20 minutes, or repeatedly for no reason, it is a Nuisance and you should complain to the council. It is more effective if several neighbours write letters of comnplaint, specifying the dates and times it went off. If not fixed the householder can be prosecuted.

  4. If you are a Good Neighbour, go and look when the alarm goes off. If there are signs of a breakin, you can call the police and they will come. If there are no signs, or you haven't looked, they won't. If you have looked, you also know if it is (appears to be) a false alarm so you can make a note of the date and time and complain to your neighbours and/or the council. If it was your own house that was being broken into, wouldn't you want someone to pay attention?

I have a commercial alarm, and take great care to avoid false alarms. This trains my neighbours to think that if it goes off, it is real.

thenightsky · 03/10/2011 22:12

Our goes off randomly too. It appears to be linked to the fire alarm somehow. It continues to go off if I pull the fuses out, throw switches etc.

Funny thing is, we've never figured out how to actually set it so may as well not bother having one. In fact, we haven't even declared on house insurance that one is fitted due to our ignorance about setting it.

PastGrace · 03/10/2011 22:17

We had some warehouse style industrial fire alarm in my student house. It went off during exams - my three flatmates had finished and were out, my boyfriend's last exam was the next day (I had finished and stayed to test him [good girlfriend emoticon]). It went off at 2am for over an hour. I couldn't enter the reset code quickly enough inbetween it going off. The boys all came back and I was just stood there getting faster and faster whilst they (drunkenly) tried to help.

I think our neighbours officially hated us. But genuinely there was nothing we could do. We called the 24 hour helpline and got a voicemail saying call back after 9am Hmm

New posts on this thread. Refresh page