Vacation ended a week ago and it already feels like a year ago. Funny how that works.
No doubt the most exciting (in a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me way) part of the vacation was a 4am call from ADT telling us our house was on fire. Yep, those are great calls to get. In what can only be termed a delicious (in hindsight) irony, there was no actual fire. This is ironic because two years ago, we actually had a fire, and ADT didn’t detect it. So in the five years that I’ve paid them $30+/month to keep my house safe, there have been two fire-related incidents. The fire went undetected, the non-fire woke us up in New Jersey and my in-laws in Virginia (they’re on the notification list in the case of an alarm event). Wanting to know whether our house was actually burning, we woke our neighbors up, and they walked a cordless phone over to the fire marshall who was about to break a window in to find the fire.
I walked him through how to get in the house without breaking the window, he walked around and confirmed that there was no fire. Terrific.
When I returned this week and called ADT, I suggested that since this wasn’t my idea of effective alarm monitoring, they told me they thought they’d done their job: “the fire detector detected a fire, we called the fire department. We did our job.”
I’m currently in the market for another alarm service. Any suggestions?
How about no alarm service?
ReplyDeleteSeriously, what on earth would you have done if there had really been a fire? Encouraged the fire marshall over the phone? Asked your neighbor to risk life and limb to save some object or momento?
I can see some minor value for burglary, but not for fire except in the case of smoke detectors to protect those in the house. Those are much less expensive, and much more reliable. Hell, my wife uses one as a timer for cooking ;-)