Residential Alarm System

A large share of the homes we protect across Ulster, Dutchess and Orange counties are only lived in part of the time: weekend places, seasonal homes, and houses standing empty while the owners travel. Break-ins are only half the problem. An empty house in a Hudson Valley January can lose heat on a Tuesday and not be found until Saturday. So the system had to do three things at once – deter the opportunist who reads an empty driveway, get a real person on the phone when something happens, and speak up about the quiet failures nobody is there to notice. It also had to work with no landline, ride out an internet outage, and be simple enough that a guest, a cleaner or a contractor can use it without calling the owner.

The XTLtouch is an all-in-one, so the panel, the keypad and the wireless receiver are a single device the size of a small picture frame. It went on the kitchen counter in its tabletop stand, which is where this family actually walks in and out. What did not go there is the siren. Most all-in-one systems bury the sounder inside the keypad, which means the one thing you want to be loud is sitting in the room you have to walk up to in order to shut it off. The XTLtouch supports up to eight separate wireless sirens, so we put them where they do some good – upstairs, and outside under the eave where a neighbor can hear it.

Every exterior door is contacted, and the ground-floor windows the owners never open are covered by glass-break detectors rather than individual contacts. Interior motion detectors handle the space between, and because the family travels with two large dogs, we used pet-immune motions so the system can stay armed with the animals loose in the house.

Communication is the part that matters most at a house nobody is standing in. The panel reports over Wi-Fi and over cellular – Verizon or AT&T LTE, depending on which carrier is stronger at the address. If the internet drops, or the power goes out and takes the router with it, the panel keeps reporting on LTE with no gap and no phone line. For a seasonal home that never had internet in the first place, cellular alone is a complete path, and it takes a broadband bill off the property.

Z-Wave is built into the panel, so locks, lamp modules and the thermostat joined the same system rather than becoming a second app. The practical wins are dull and constant: unlock the back door for the cleaner on Thursday morning and watch it lock behind them, and hold the house at 55 degrees all winter with a low-temperature alert that fires long before a pipe does.

Finally, Entry Check-In Protection. If someone opens a door and never disarms – a guest fumbling a code, or someone who should not be there at all – the panel does not simply wait out the entry delay and give up. It escalates. Alarms land at a UL-Listed monitoring center staffed around the clock, not just as a notification on a phone that might be face-down in a coat pocket.