There are many types of home alarm equipment designed to report intrusions, smoke, fire and other damages involving personal residential property. Basic and commonly used home alarm equipment consists of audio alarms, glass break alarms, door alarms, motion alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, smoke alarms and fire alarms. When certain conditions are detected, these alarms can make a loud noise and trigger flashing lights to alert those in or around the home, they can alert an alarm monitoring service, or they can do both. Many systems also include alarms that monitor the home alarm equipment to ensure that the equipment has battery power or electrical power and to ensure that the monitoring service is receiving proper signals from the operating system at all times.
Audio alarms are detected by sensors placed in various locations around the home when the system has been fully armed by a valid user with the correct code. Glass break detectors fall under the classification of audio equipment because they essentially are audio detectors that trip at the frequency of breaking glass. Many noises can match this frequency and therefore might trigger this alarm, so if a noisy home environment uses a monitoring service, notes might need to be added to the monitoring account to prevent an inappropriate dispatch because of an unexplained glass break audio.
There are three main types of door alarms that are triggered in different ways. Delay doors are set up to give users enough time to disarm or disengage the system before an alarm is sounded or the monitoring service dispatches emergency personnel. Trap doors and 24-hour doors have an alarm sound or are dispatched on immediately. Propped doors can be monitored and are dispatched on after accompanying audio and video that is received with the alarm has been reviewed.
Motion alarms are the most varied type of home alarm equipment. The signature purpose of perimeter alarms is to detect anything unusual on the premises surrounding the home in yards, driveways, garages, walkways and outdoor enclosures. Beam alarms are set to pick up any kind of movement or passage of an object or person between two points. They have a tendency to be extremely sensitive and can be tripped by animals, snow, rain, fog and even sunbeams or tumbleweeds. Other motion detectors can be placed inside of the home or garage areas. The sensitivity levels of motion alarms should be considered if there frequently are animals on the property.