the police was dispatched to ... the wrong house

you're wasting your time trying to rationalize with fishstick. bAss is mad that Frank got his monitoring services shut down and so he just slanders monitoring out of spite. without even thinking it through he just slams monitoring and those that provide it do to his irrational hatred and bile toward real providers.

In the nine years I've been running an online DIY store there have been 3 or at most 4 of my clients who have come to ASA looking for advice. OTOH, there have been thousands of people who came to ASA looking for help and then (after receiving the usual rude replies from some of the "professionals" who infest this newsgroup) came to my online store to get tech support and then buy their alarm systems. I guess that makes me the unofficial tech support rep for ASA. :^)

It's clearly an inept central station. The OP should get another provider.

Fables and fairy tales from a dead mans perspective.

Exactly, they have no choice unless they want to risk a hefty lawsuit

That depends on what instructions the customer may have had with the central station and what signal was sent (example: silent panic/hostage), the original poster just stated an alarm condition which could be anything

You resp "Please explain this to me.

If the central station has on file that account# 123456 is located at

123 1st Ave, and they have never been informed that the panel sending in signals with that account information has been moved, then why wouldn't they dispatch to that address?"

This was in response to the following exchange:

"> Some people move alarm panels without > telling the central station

If they do, the worst thing the CS can do is send the cops to the old address. I realize this is confusing to you but try real hard and perhaps it will become clear (or at least not entirely blurry) to you."

The only thing I can think of is that you misunderstood the conversation.

Which is really nothing new (for Bass). Welcome to ASA.

Yep. And you're just as "free" to ignore the phone and your emails. After all, what's one more complaint at the BBB?

Actually, you're not as "free" as you like to think you are. Your medical condition means all your future "vacations" have open returns.

Uh-huh, and had to come home before you wanted to.

I'm sure one more "Piranha" in the Amazon won't make a huge difference.

Which will probably result in a few more complaints being filed at the BBB. Good on you!

It's doubtful that you'd even get the chance to fire "people like him".

You keep resp "Please explain this to me.

If the central station has on file that account# 123456 is located at

123 1st Ave, and they have never been informed that the panel sending in signals with that account information has been moved, then why wouldn't they dispatch to that address?"

This was in response to the following exchange:

"> Some people move alarm panels without > telling the central station

If they do, the worst thing the CS can do is send the cops to the old address. I realize this is confusing to you but try real hard and perhaps it will become clear (or at least not entirely blurry) to you."

The only thing I can think of is that you misunderstood the conversation.

He not only misunderstood the conversation, he obviously has no clue as to how a Central Station operates. So much for his "running" one for

10, 16, 18, 24 (or whatever the latest number is) years.

It's his method of damage control. As in; better to keep silent and be thought a fool, than to respond to your post and remove all doubt. js

I've been accused of being "out there," yes.

There's a difference between avoiding and not bothering.

I thought it was obvious enough.

Let me try it again with emphgasis: *If* the panel has been rel;ocated, *then* the worst thing the CS can do is send the police to the old address.

I understood the conversation. The point is, if the panel is no longer at 499 Casino Ave, in Cranford but now resides at 91 Pine Ave in Garwood, the worst thing the central station can do is send the cops to Casino Ave.

Do you disagree?

BTW, if the CS and the installer were doing things right such a situation would be less likely to go undetected. By "doing it right" I mean using daily test signals and capturing Caller ID. Although even that is not 100% foolproof, it can signal a problem in most cases before it leads to a disaster because someone would have been alerted that signals from the account had wrong ICLID data. This should normally lead to an investigation by the CS or the installing company to determine what has changed.

Even the small central station I built did this. We used daily auto-test on all residential accounts. All commercial accounts also sent opening and closing signals. Every signal received was checked for the proper Caller ID. In those days not every signal came in with Caller ID but those which did were logged and compared with the prior call from that account. If anything changed, a "service report" was generated and we would call to ask if the customer had changed phone numbers.

Sometimes we'd discover that the home or building had been sold. We'd offer to sign up the new owners. If they didn't want service we'd program out the monitoring and leave the system as a local alarm.

Other times the client had simply changed phone service but once in a while we'd get someone who had moved and taken their panel with them. Such moves of professionally installed systems were rare but they did happen. The important thing is to provide a means to detect this and then deal with it.

Few companies run their own CS these days. Daily test timers are usually only for fire accounts or cell back up accounts since there is an extra charge for these services (depending on CS and number of accounts dealer has at that CS). Monthly test timers on residential accounts is more common (standard) since they are typically not charged to dealer, although as you know a few older panels can't do that or can't do a 30 days interval. Open and close reports (log only) are common (standard) on any commercial account. Open and closing supervision is an extra charge of course. Most alarm dealers are aware of the above of course, but I thought I'd put it out there to be certain others are operating a similar business practice and level of service.

It's the only thing they can do other than nothing, they have no way of knowing if the panel is NOT at the old location, they have no way of knowing the customer didn't just change phone numbers, they are not there to investigate where a customer's panel is they are to dispatch when that alarm panel sends a signal

Yes because last I checked Caller ID did not also transmit addresses and therefore they would now know the panel was no longer at 499 Casino Ave.

I went with central station automation very early on. Our first system was actually a home-brew but it wasn't very useful. After a couple of years I bought BOLD fropm Bradley. The system handled daily tests with operator intervention only on exceptions (fail to test). We then made daily tests a standard feature. It gave me an edge over the competition.

With virtually all modern CSA packages, daily test can be done with negligible added labor. Of course, CS operators often charge extra anyway. How much extra varies more with monitoring company greed than with cost.

That's true. The problem is that a 30-day interval is too long. An awful lot can happen in a single day, let alone a month.

Agreed. Perhaps I should have been more specific. Although we did not charge extra for O/C reports, we did charge for O/C supervision because that did entail extra operator time and/or my time to remote arm the system if an employee left a premises unprotected past the normal closing time.

This is one of the areas where small, independent central station alarm companies can excel over the large, national firms. None of the large CS operators like Monitronics, P1, etc., offer daily test or unsupervised open and close reports without an extra charge. Almost none are willing to remote arm if the system doesn't report a closing signal on time.

Uh, no. It is not. They could try actually capturing and ptocessing Caller ID. They could offer daily tests and o/c reports like we have been discussing. T^hey could take the trouble to check when a test signal has the wrong Caller ID so that people like the OP don't have to pay fines due to alarm company stupidity.

Of course, all of the above would require caring about things like service and quality. Since Leuck works for a firm where those are foreign words, I can understand why he thinks there's nothing more to be done.

If the Caller ID showed a different prefix, they would know right away that the call was coming from Garwood -- not Cranford. Of course, this is all tangential since the real issue here is that some paid installer jiminexed up the programming on another panel, causing the OP to have to deal with false alarms that weren't even coming from his home.

Rocket science at its best.

I would agree if the CS had been notified of the move. In the example we are discussing the CS had not been notified.

So you are telling me that if you owned a CS and an alarm came in from one of your accounts which according to your records was located at 499 Casino Ave but the alarm came in with the wrong CID you would NOT dispatch?

The point is, if the sub moves the panel and doesn't tell you about it how are you to know? Especially if the alarm comes in before the next scheduled test signal.

discussing the CS had not been notified.

That is not what I said. If one of my accounts came in with a wrong Caller ID we would have known about it and dealt with it before it became a problem. That's what daily test sighnals are for.

Caller ID. The only exception is if he moves the panel and keeps his original phone number. I don't recall that ever having happened to one of our accounts though I'm sure it could happen. In such a case the CS would of course dispatch to the address on file.

I programmed our systems to report on power restoral. We used an alternate line card for those signals to avoid overloading the emergency lines during/after storms.

The point here is that alarm companies and central stations are not helpless victims, unable to prevent mysterious false alarms or erroneous dispatches. There is almost always something which can and should be done to reduce the likelihood of an error. The problem is getting management to spend the time, effort and money to do something about these problems.