Your alarm goes off at 3:40am. Who drives to the building?
For a lot of BC businesses the answer is whoever answers the phone. Usually a manager, in a dressing gown, forty minutes away, with no idea what they are walking into.
Alarm response puts a licensed officer there instead. This covers how it works, what it costs, and when it is worth it.
What actually happens on a call
Your monitoring company detects an activation and contacts the response provider.
An officer attends. They check the perimeter, look for signs of entry, and establish whether anything is wrong.
If the building is secure, they reset or secure as instructed, log the attendance with time stamps and photographs, and go. You read about it over breakfast.
If something is wrong, they call police, stay on site, and keep you informed. They do not enter and confront anyone. That is not what the service is, and any provider suggesting otherwise is selling you liability.
What it costs
Alarm response is usually priced two ways, and the mix matters.
A monthly retainer covering availability, often with a number of included attendances.
A per-call fee for each attendance, sometimes with a higher rate outside business hours.
What pushes the cost up: distance from the officer's patrol route, how many calls your site generates, and whether you want key-holding included.
That last one is worth considering. If the officer holds keys, they can enter, check internally and properly secure the building. If not, they can only assess from outside, which limits what the service is worth.
Our price guide covers the wider rate picture.
The real cost is false alarms
Here is the thing most businesses underestimate.
Most alarm activations are false. Doors not closed properly, staff entering the wrong code, a faulty sensor, a balloon in a warehouse, a spider on a motion detector.
Every one of those costs you an attendance fee, and in many BC municipalities repeated false alarms also attract bylaw charges when police attend.
So the cheapest thing you can do before buying response is fix your false alarm rate. Which doors are failing. Which staff need retraining on the code. Which sensor keeps tripping.
A provider who tells you that before selling you a contract is one worth using. We would rather attend four real calls a year than forty false ones.
When response is worth buying
It earns its cost when:
Your premises are far from whoever currently holds keys.
You have staff being called out at night, which is both a safety issue and a retention one.
Your insurer has asked for it, or will reduce premiums with it in place.
Your site generates genuine activations, not just faults.
You need documented attendance. The log is the evidence that someone came, when, and what they found.
When it is not
If your alarm goes off twice a year and your manager lives ten minutes away, you may not need a contract. Honest answer.
If your activations are nearly all faults, fix the system first.
And if the actual problem is that people are trying your doors regularly, response is reactive. Mobile patrol prevents, and often costs less than repeated callouts. Our alarm response service guide covers the comparison.
Response times, and what to ask
Nobody can promise a fixed response time to every address.
What you can establish:
Where is the officer who would attend my site actually based overnight? Not where the office is.
How many sites are they covering on that shift?
What is a realistic attendance window for my address at 3am, as opposed to the advertised one?
What happens if two alarms go off at once?
A provider who gives you a straight answer to the last question is being honest with you. The answer is always that one gets attended first.
Making the arrangement work
Three things that are entirely in your control.
Keep your contact list current. The most common failure in alarm response is nobody answering the escalation call, and it is almost always because the list has not been updated since someone left.
Give the provider a site plan. Which doors, which alarm zones, where the panel is, which activations are routine and which are serious.
Review the logs quarterly. If the same zone keeps triggering, you have a maintenance problem, not a security one.
Talk to us
Fireball Security provides alarm response across British Columbia, usually alongside mobile patrol on the same route, which keeps attendance times and costs down. Since 2020, 100+ licensed guards, 100+ clients in 11 cities, $2M CAD in comprehensive general liability.
Tell us about your site or call 250-899-6620.
