Burglar alarms and servicing / maintenance- what do you do?

[shoom]

This is all new to me...

I assume burglar alarms should be serviced and maintained. While checking quotes for home insurance this comes up. The system that's installed in the house I'm buying is an old, simple one that's not suitable for monitoring. Thoughts please! Should I have an annual agreement to get it serviced, or would you check things yourself and only contact someone if there's a problem ?

Our alarm cost more to have serviced annually than it saved us on the premiums so we dropped the service contract. No problem in 9 years.

You need to speak to your house insurers. If they are giving you a discount for having an alarm check with them what requirements there are in your end to keep the discount valid. If it is too onerous get them to run the quote minus the alarm

if it is an old unmonitored alarm the insurers will probably treat it as the lowest ungraded type. It will not meet their requirements if they require you to have an approved alarm. They might say they are giving you a small discount, but it will probably be on the basis that the alarm is always armed and in good working order whenever the house is unoccupied or when you retire for the night. This may mean that they will not pay a claim if the alarm was not armed or did not work. In which case I would not describe the house as having an alarm.

We pay £70 per year for our alarm to be serviced, this includes any problems so if it started playing up at any time day or night we just call them. It's a local company, not a big chain.

I recently paid £40 to have our alarm serviced. We've been in this house for 5 years and had never used it - I didn't even know what the code was!

Then workman in the house had to move one of the motion sensors in one of the rooms and set it off...although it switched itself off again after much panicked pressing of random buttons on keypad. I called friends dh who works for the local company who had installed it, and apparently it wasn't meant to switch off like that, so I decided it was time to get it sorted out.

Still haven't ever used it, but at least now I have a code for it, know its working properly, so we could if we wanted to!

Thank you!

As others have said it's probably not worth declaring, if there is ever and issue with it and you get burgled they will not pay out. It happened to me a few years ago. We now have a monitored alarm but still do not declare it, we have it for peace of mind. The discount you are getting is probably tiny.