I dont worry too much about what happens outside my home. I hear yelling and screaming, car alarms and stuff getting thrown around all the time and I just ignore it. I dont have anything exterior to the house so as far as I am concerned, it is someone else's problem.
I dont answer my door and I dont have a home phone either.
I have had three false alarms in a year.
The first, I received an email on my BlackBerry from my alarm system that said a zone had been tripped. I called 911 and had the cops do a drive-by and check for signs of entry. No issue. Few weeks later I got a letter stating that next time it would cost me $50.00. Whatever.
The second and third incident happened during the night after the wife and I had gone to bed. The first time the alarm went off while we were home I was all jacked-up. I was standing at the top of the stairs and had a 5 shot .38 pointed downward toward the living room (siren still running). I had my wife tell me what was on the alarm panel in the MBR closet. The panel read "Motion in Living".
I told her to kill the alarm and them I waited and listened.
Lessons learned:
1. I was under-gunned. All my hardware was locked-up in the basement with the exception of a 5-shot .38 +P. Not a good feeling.
2. I should not have stood at the top of the stairs out in the open (no cover)
3. I should have re-armed the system immediately and waited/listened longer before clearing the house. Any motion would have set the alarm off again and eliminated the possibility of a false alarm.
4. I was not really prepared in having thought through the sequence of events regarding the alarm system and how the system functions. What I mean by this is that the panel I have will display every zone that gets tripped. The only tripped zone was a motion detector in the living room. Had I thought about this at the time, it would have dawned on me that this event was probably a false alarm since no exterior zones had been tripped. Had this been a real event, the panel would have displayed (for example):
A. Basement Glass (entered the home)
B. Motion in Basement (walked to the stairs)
C. Motion in Living (entered living room from basement)
The next false alarm happened a couple nights ago. Things were calmer and we assumed that there was a 98% chance that this was a false alarm.
Lessons learned this time around:
1. When getting back from vacation earlier that evening, I should have checked the house immediately just to know that there was nothing funky going on and all windows / doors were secure
2. The wife killed the system too soon and without reading the panel which prevented us from knowing which zones got tripped. I didnt know how to recall the event log so I was SOL. The manual for the alarm system was also in the basement.
- She also had trouble re-arming the system probably as a result of being nervous.
From the two "at home" events, I learned that I need to better document my alarm system, think more about tactics (who does what, when and where) and do some drills with the wife for training.