I trust nothing - So we went the whole nine yards

This is our experience with the system and monitoring in the U.K.

As per the title, I trust nothing. Therefore, we deliberately attacked the system to see what would happen.

Apologies to Securitas (the UK monitoring service) But they were extremely decent about things - I explained after the event that I would only be doing this once. I could have been generous by telling them first - but I wanted to see how well they react when they know nothing about what is going on.

I received a call within approximately 4 minutes. (In fact, I received two separate calls - perhaps the staged event looked too genuine).

I arranged for my partner to enter via the back door of the house - which immediately set off the base unit siren and the additional siren. Although these could be heard on the street they were not really loud enough to gain anybody's attention - first point - install an additional outdoor siren.

She then traversed all areas of the house "looking for stuff', grabbed an IPad I left out for her, and then calmly walked out of the front door.

Apart from the sirens, my phone was firing off alerts one after another.

I got the call from the monitoring service - who asked if it was me and then asked for the code word. After that I explained that the whole thing was deliberate and staged and that it would not be repeated. It said that I would also turn off the alarm. The respondent was polite, courteous and understanding.

A minute later I had a second call, where again I gave the code word and explained what I was doing. The respondent said no problem, but in future, please call beforehand so they can set a flag on their system that this is only a test. I agreed and apologised, but explained that the only real way to test is to do it for real without them knowing. Again, the respondent was sympathetic. I then asked her whether she had views all of the camera footage to which she replied yes.

So - absolute peace of mind - it works. Unfortunately, in this example, the "perp' would have walked out with the IPad and been long gone before we asked for the police. So video review is essential. And there was plenty of it. But in fairness to Securitas, you don't normally leave all the doors unlocked so that somebody can just walk in and out.

And surprisingly, there was the sound of the camera siren going off on the recorded video from the outdoor camera. Which is very interesting, because the camera produced no audible siren sound in the real event (I asked my "perp' to specially listen out for this!)

No animals were harmed in this staged event. But I will probably have woken somebody up in the monitoring centre. And they might have been a bit surprised at the gall of this person calmly going around the house looking for "swag'.

Hope this helps somebody considering buying the system and the otherwise costly monitoring. Everything fired off, everything recorded, the whole incident was covered all over the house and outside by quickly retrievable recorded video.

But I will be installing an alternative additional outdoor camera system. I am not happy with the Simplisafe outdoor camera. Sorry.