Priority Interrupt by Steve Ciarcia Old Reliable

As I sit here writing this, Don, an "alarm system professional," is ripping apart 20 years of cozy interdependence between my home control system (HCS) and a new commercially installed alarm system. It’s not an easy alteration for me.

Insurance companies don’t understand invention or ingenuity. You can talk about living in a computer-controlled environment complete with Robbie the Robot delivering the nightly newspaper and it won’t make any difference to them. All they want to know is whether or not you have an alarm system installed in order to qualify for a substantial discount on your homeowner’s insurance.

The gottcha is in the definition of "alarm system." It doesn’t matter that you’ve installed all the latest surveillance goodies yourself or that you even have some fantasy arrangement that locks perpetrators in an enclosed area (like the ATM systems with entry areas that catch ’em and bag ’em). The question is always, What alarm company did you use and what service bureau is handling the alarm calls? Basically, all they want to know is which commercial alarm system you have. So, 20 years ago, in order to satisfy the insurance company, I had a commercial alarm system installed. It was a good system for its day and has satisfied my insurance-mandated security needs ever since.

I realize your first question is, How can Steve Ciarcia live with anything electronic that is 20 years old? In principle I agree that’s very old, but think about what an alarm system really does—not much. For the most part, it only exists to monitor contact closures (from a variety of sensors) and autodial an alarm service bureau when one of the contacts trips. Virtually all of the changes to commercial alarm system sophistication in the last 20 years have been about adding environmental programming (i.e., allowing multiple sensor configurations and staged responses) and external interaction (i.e., checking on the house from anywhere). Underneath all the bells and whistles of these megabuck commercial alarms, it is simply a contact closure that calls the service bureau and turns on a siren that wakes up the whole neighborhood.

The philosophy that allowed me to live with 20-year-old electronics is simply this: if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. The evolution of security and control in my house has never been with the alarm system. I merely treat the alarm system as an auto-dialer and siren source. The much greater sophistication and quantity of sensors incorporated within the HCS serve as an always improving front-end to the alarm system. The HCS makes the real decisions. For all practical purposes, the whole HCS is one big intelligent contact closure for an antique that has worked fine for 20 years.

Unfortunately, retirement isn’t always planned. About three weeks ago, I started having intermittent shorts in the wiring and failures in the alarm keypad. The HCS can decide whether or not something is a security threat, but it is just a bucket of bolts when the police pull up after the commercial alarm triggers on a false positive. When that happens, it is definitely time for some new equipment.

At this point, Don has been ripping stuff out and rewiring for three days. Instead of one small alarm controller, I now have two large equipment boxes. It’s a big secret what’s inside them. I have to wait for the great unveiling when he explains how tremendously more versatile (he really means "complicated") everything is now and how many more things this system does than my 20-year-old controller.

Unfortunately, like the insurance industry, alarm system manufacturers have their own ideas about your system needs, and it’s their way or else. I know that the new system attempts to incorporate many of the features already in my HCS. I envision competition rather than cooperation between the systems. Everything used to be a simple four-digit code. Now I bet it will take 20 digits just to bypass conflicting operations so I don’t have a battle for supremacy between the HCS and the alarm. Oh, well.

After Don finishes, I’ll take a look at the connections to see how he’s hooked things up. Maybe I can still adjust the connections on this new system so it simulates my old reliable. Of course, that all depends on whether or not I can survive the fact that I’ll probably have to spend the next six months rewiring everything he’s just ripped out.