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What happens when the Alarm goes off?
Home » Office Equipment » Alarm Systems » What happens when the Alarm goes off?When a security alarm goes off, the loud noise is generally only one of many things that happen in response to a perceived intrusion.
If your business has an unmonitored alarm system, the alarm will often be accompanied by one or several bright light beams. Ideally, the noise and the light will alert neighbors, who will then call the police or fire department to report the alarm. The alarm, meanwhile, will continue to sound until it is manually shut off.
In contrast, when a monitored alarm goes off, several things happen in response. First, the security system will wait fifteen to forty-five seconds before sending the alarm signal to the monitoring company. This brief pause allows authorized personnel to turn off the alarm if they set it off by accident. If the alarm was not an accident, the system will inform the monitoring company, and the monitoring company will immediately call the workplace via phone and/or two-way intercom to find out who has tripped the alarm. If no one responds or if the responding person is not authorized for entry, the monitoring company will immediately notify the authorities, and the police will arrive on the scene shortly. In some cases, all this activity occurs before the system sounds an audible alarm; this way, police can rush to the scene before the intruder is aware that he has been detected.
This entire alarm sequence takes little more than a minute using the business’s existing land phone lines. Consequently, if someone at the workplace needs to dial 911 as the alarm is going off, that person must use a cell phone or secondary line.
The alarm sequence is designed in large part to weed out false alarms. State Farm Insurance reports that an estimated ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of alarms turn out to be false alarms. If you accidentally trip your business alarm system, don’t run from it, just report that it was a false alarm and suffer the embarrassment.
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