If your system doesn't have a phone dialer, you can add one for much less
than $350.00 a year. They are programmable, so when we are away for weeks at
a time I put the sheriff's dept. number in and also notify them of our
plans. For more routine day/weekend trips and running around the dialer
calls mine and my wife's cell. We arm it every evening also with our cells
as the primary number. I took the sheriff number off as the primary do to
false trips and not wanting to have them 2nd guess what was going on,
because no matter how careful my wife and I were, eventually we would get a
false trip. It might be 12-18 months between them but still not good to have
them respond to a ooops sorry about that.

"Mike" wrote in message
...
My wife is looking for ways to cut some expenses out of our family
budget, and she has suggested that we drop the monitoring of our home
alarm system. She got the idea from a friend of ours who has done the
same at his small business. If his alarm starts going off in the
middle of the night, then it will continue to sound until he shows up
the next morning. I wouldn't say we live in a extremely high-crime
area, but we do live in the suburbs of a city where there is a good
deal of crime. Any of you folks going "unmonitored" out there??

Thanks....

Mike

P.S. Our alarm system consists of sensors on all doors, a motion
detector on the main floor, and a smoke alarm (we have several battery-
operated smoke detectors, too).