October 2005
Dear Valued Customer:
THANK YOU for your continued patronage and for recommending HART ALARM SYSTEMS to your family, friends and neighbors whenever the subject of security is brought up. Basically, there are two sources of new clients and customers for us. The first is to find people cold—that is, we do not know them and they do not know us. The second source, and the best way by far, is via a referral from one or more satisfied customers. Such referrals have been the reason for our continued growth over the years.
For the past several months we have been asking you to call us if you are considering doing away with your traditional "hard-wired" telephone service and just having wireless cellular service. There are additional items of hardware required in order to continue to monitor your alarm system. Recently, the cable companies have started to promote their "VoIP" technology ("Voice over Internet Protocol") as a substitute for "hard-wired" telephone service.
In addition to not working during a power or broadband service outage, VoIP technology will not allow alarm system monitoring. Their 911 Emergency dialing operates differently from traditional 911 service. It will be interesting to see how they overcome the lack of a Directory and the ability to determine a subscriber’s phone number. Our concern obviously is to be able to provide monitoring for your alarm system, so PLEASE give us a call before you cancel your existing phone service.
October is National Fire Prevention & Awareness Month. We suggest you consider having a family fire drill, especially if you have young children. Here are my annual reminders.
Keeping in mind we may be sleeping when a fire breaks out, we should have a well thought out evacuation plan for our home. Be sure each family member knows at least two escape routes to follow when told to leave AND where to gather outside. Select a gathering spot so everyone can be accounted for quickly. Going back into a fire looking for a missing child, spouse or parent is a leading cause of fatalities in household fires.
In addition, give some thought to upgrading your alarm system to include fire detection devices such as heat detectors and smoke detectors if you don’t currently have them. A little time makes a great deal of difference as firemen will attest. A moment can sometimes equate to a lifetime.
Every now and then I remind you of our maintenance agreements which we designed to keep your alarm system in good working order at a minimum cost to you. A dirty smoke detector doesn’t always false alarm; quite often it just goes into an inactive mode and does not work at all. If you haven’t had the total system checked out in some time, now is a good time to take out an agreement and have an inspection made to determine that it is still doing what it was originally designed to do.
