comment on fire alarm communication and back up battery

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Dear Ken,

Once again I have to express my appreciation of this forum which you facilitate. Thank you.

On the subject of the potential downside of losing control of a common installer code; this is quite a frightening prospect, and so the question becomes, “How can I have unique installer and master codes for all clients, to reduce the potential of a the code falling into the wrong hands and yet not have to worry about forgetting or in some other way not knowing what that PIN will be?”

Our solution for this is to use a mathematical formula on the unique CSID.

Although it is probably not our problem, a similar compromise arises when a guard company insists on using the same PIN for all their clients.

We have no intention of ever getting into the guard business. Our perception is that this is a self-serving and sloppy response to false alarms. Our clients might use one of several guard companies as a property reference. These guard companies typically want to use a common PIN, and it is uncanny how often that is the company phone number. How secure is that?!

Our response is to try to encourage the client to use the guard company that will accept our simple formula for ‘unique security guard PINs.’ Just as for unique installer codes, we advise a simple mathematical formula applied to the clients unique CSID.

Tod Smith - President

Shadow Alarms Ltd.

www.ShadowSolutions.ca

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fire loss question

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Hi Ken

My customer suffered a fire loss in her home in the basement ($2-$3 mil home) my first ever in 14 years of business.

What happened was they have solar panels on the roof and inverter with batteries in the basement.

The solar inverter that transforms DC voltage to household AC voltage caught on fire. Smokes det. did detect fire/smoke and promptly called fire dept. after initial verification with customer and came on scene to take care of the situation. Customer was not home to my knowledge.

It was an electrical fire. I don’t know how much was really consumed by actual fire, but the smoke was extremely thick and they couldn’t see each other when at the door.

Customer did say that this particular inverter was replaced 2 times already because it malfunctioned in the past ( and now caught on fire) Customer was very happy with monitoring and response of my central station, was very pleasant when we spoke on the phone about what happened.

Next time I will try to get the model/manufacturer of this panel-inverter and announce it here so everyone could be on notice.

QUESTION:

Should I notify my insurance co about this situation?? To date I did not hear from anybody other than alarm history showing fire alarm and my initial call to the customer.

Thanks

Anon

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Answer

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You have a potential claim and you should put your insurance carrier on notice now. You can let the claims department know that you have not received a claim, and that you don't anticipate receiving a claim, but that there has been an incident and you want to put the carrier on notice. You could ask that the carrier assign counsel to assist you in the event you get inquiries, but that will be charged against your deductible and is probably not necessary in your case. When there is a greater likelihood of a claim it would be advisable to get counsel to assist with inquiries.

In your case you should obtain and retain the log history from the panel and the central station records for the incident.

 

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comment on fire alarm communication and back up battery

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Ken

The whole back up battery issue is a joke with voip modems. If the cable goes out at the central office or the power in the area goes out.... the signal going to your modem will not be there. What good did the battery back up do? When was the last time the batteries, if any, were changed on the telephone pole that houses the amps or repeaters? Pots, still the way to go with radio back-up.!!

Mike

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