Finally, having battled with SEO, I am putting my thoughts together in this new blog. Hopefully I will have the time and energy and the prodding of few smart people to keep it going here :).
Saturday, August 14, 2010
If you are in the Atlanta area, call on my brother's new Handyman biz
Especially if you are commercial - a hotel, office, building or industrial enterprise needing facility management maintenance work, he is offering some really good deals to sign you up as customer at this point. The company - Crisis Solutions of Georgia has a good deal of experience in this kind of maintenance work. Especially pools, large scale equipment etc. If you own a home and have regular handyman work, you may want to give Crisis Solutions of Georgia a shot as well. Tell them I sent you there and get a discount!
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
Zones problem in Simon XT
The Simon XT is proving to be a pretty robust system. Once thing I noticed and which seemed a setback to me was how the the sensors were assigned to hardcoded zones. The system allows around 30 or more individual sensors (which includes the wireless devices like the keypad or keyfob) but each sensor must be assigned a group when making it part of the live system. The alarm can be turned on in a few modes by the user: Arm the doors and windows, Arm Motion Sensors. There are a few more modes, but these are the ones you would most frequently use. There is no function like arm the doors and windows and arm only the motion sensors in the basement (leaving other motion sensors off). All of the motion sensors are in one group and that group is controlled by a single motion sensor on/off button. Reading on how other alarm systems like Rokonet define zones I was pretty alarmed by this.
Friday, September 25, 2009
Why not Visonic or Rokonet?
Lot of folks may ask why I ended up excluding Visonic and Rokonet from the security system choices and the answer is pretty simple. Its a combination or two things:
a) Both Visonic and Rokonet are pretty sophisticated - much more when comapred to GE or Ademco I think. For example one feature which I remember was Rokonet's ability to split the sensors into different phases or groups. Both systems came with add on GPRS cards. However, what concerned me was that in order to operate these systems over GPRS, you have to buy and maintain the card and minutes yourself. If you run out of minutes, it is your problem. Both GE and Ademco have services Alarm.com and Alarm.net which take this hassle out making the systems more reliable I think. With self management, you also run the danger of loosing connectivity and you may not be able to follow up with your cell carrier in case things go south. You are basically buying minutes as a prepaid card or regular account.
The second big problem was that the variety of the add on sensors for these two systems was low and the prices were high. I think that pretty much sealed the deal for me ;)
a) Both Visonic and Rokonet are pretty sophisticated - much more when comapred to GE or Ademco I think. For example one feature which I remember was Rokonet's ability to split the sensors into different phases or groups. Both systems came with add on GPRS cards. However, what concerned me was that in order to operate these systems over GPRS, you have to buy and maintain the card and minutes yourself. If you run out of minutes, it is your problem. Both GE and Ademco have services Alarm.com and Alarm.net which take this hassle out making the systems more reliable I think. With self management, you also run the danger of loosing connectivity and you may not be able to follow up with your cell carrier in case things go south. You are basically buying minutes as a prepaid card or regular account.
The second big problem was that the variety of the add on sensors for these two systems was low and the prices were high. I think that pretty much sealed the deal for me ;)
Thursday, September 24, 2009
Hooray for the Simon XT
After a lot of market survey, I finally picked Simon XT from Safemart. Really loved Safemart's customer service (Nice work Jason ;). I looked at a whole bunch of systems out there from GE, Ademco, DSC, Visonic and Rokonet. I finally picked the GE system because these guys had a nice deal on it and it seemed to satisfy all my needs: A wireless system which could be extended with an outside siren, X10, GPRS if I needed. The cost of the add on sensors also was reasonable. Ademco was a close competition though all the time, except that GE has a better GPRS solution and seems to be a more open system. Ademco did have smaller sensors for window contacts which seemed more aesthetic but the $100 discount on GE from safemart laid these doubts to rest ;)
Sunday, May 24, 2009
First test post on Personal Security
Ah finally I got to creating this blog since I decided I wanted to find time to write about this topic since almost two months now.
In the past few weeks I have been doing a lot of research in the area of personal security - home security and identity theft prevention. For example: what kinds of measures can we take to prevent or protect ourselves in the case our identity is stolen or compromised. On the home security front, I recently also installed a wireless home security system which was an interesting experience for me and I went through a whole bunch of cost/feature and need analysis for a very simple wireless system. I plan to keep you posted on these topics and invite some practical suggestions for the same.
In the past few weeks I have been doing a lot of research in the area of personal security - home security and identity theft prevention. For example: what kinds of measures can we take to prevent or protect ourselves in the case our identity is stolen or compromised. On the home security front, I recently also installed a wireless home security system which was an interesting experience for me and I went through a whole bunch of cost/feature and need analysis for a very simple wireless system. I plan to keep you posted on these topics and invite some practical suggestions for the same.
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