What are some of the better home alarm systems or services out there? I don't want people to write in here that they don't have any type of alarm for your own safety
Let's assume we all have them!
I guess a lot depends on why you want an alarm at all. It's hard to say what's good and what's better without knowing what problem you're trying to solve.
When my insurance company said I had to have an alarm system I wasn't happy, because being one of the only houses in the street that had an alarm system might as well have been a big bold banner saying "Stuff worth stealing right here". In the end I went with the cheapest system that ticked the boxes the insurance company required.
If you have a monitored alarm you get to pay an ongoing monthly fee for the monitoring. You can get a fake alarm box to bolt onto the outside of your house for a fraction of the monthly fee, and if you use an LED that flashes every few seconds it looks like it's active. My alarm system had a bell box (the bit that makes the noise) in one place and a fake bell box in another place so whichever way you approached the house you'd see an alarm box. For my purposes it would have been just as good to have two fake boxes.
You'll need to consider what sort of protection you want, whether you need multiple zones (so, for example, you can set the downstairs sensors to trigger the alarm at night while the upstairs ones won't), whether you have pets in the house (a cat jumping onto the back of the sofa will trigger many sensors). Then you've got the questions about what sort of sensors you want (passive IR, radio wave, microwave etc), whether you want corded or cordless (cordless means no cables to run but you have to periodically change the batteries, which an insurance company may require be done by the provider), door switches etc. Then you get to choose whether you want a control panel, remote control (much like the keyfob to unlock your car), proximity tags etc. If you really want to push the boat out consider time-restricted access (so if you have a cleaner they can get in during the times they're supposed to be there but can't use their access code at night). Then comes the question of how much you want to pay for it all.
I found it interesting changing the batteries in my cordless sensors. As soon as I opened the case the control panel beeped to warn me that the tamper switch has been activated. Changing the battery was trivial enough but reassembling was a little tricky. The sensors had two tamper switches, and getting them both to align properly as the case was closed proved tricky. After the first one worked out the next three were easy, and the door switches were a doddle. After I moved out I took the alarm system away with me, and last I heard it was in pieces in a friend's garage because I didn't want it any more.
