Service Announcements Posts

The Alarm Grid team is going to be enjoying the holiday. If you are in need of service, please email us at support@alarmgrid.com.

As usual, Alarm Grid's monitoring partner, CMS will be open through the Thanksgiving holiday, and will make sure that your homes are being looked over while you are gone. You can reach the central station by calling the Alarm Grid main phone number, and dialing "1".

If you're in charge of cooking this year, don't forget to turn off your oven. And if you're one of the intrepid souls who is deep frying your bird, do it safely. While we have confidence in our life safety devices like the 5808W3 or the 5809, our hope is that you never ever ever need to use them.

Oh, and before I forget, here at Alarm Grid, we are thankful that you have given us the opportunity to protect your home and family. Thank you for being part of the Alarm Grid family. And we hope that next year, when this holiday comes back around, that you are still here.

Alarm Grid's headquartered right in the pathway of hurricane Matthew. For the safety of our employees, we're shutting down the office tomorrow. Hopefully, we will be back up and running on Friday, but that will depend on a few factors like whether or not power has been restored and debris cleared from the roads by that time.

In the meantime, we ask for a little bit of patience. Expect some delays in responses to tickets and phone calls. We are doing our best to get to every single person, but will be working with only half of the team.

While the Alarm Grid office will be closed, it's important for us to note that this storm will not affect your central station services!

Alarm Grid works with Criticom monitoring services (CMS). They have 3 central stations, one of which is in Longwood, Florida. They are promising to maintain staff levels at Longwood as long as it is safe. But, for good measure, Criticom has increased their staff at the Manasquan, NJ and Cypress, CA stations.

It's moments like this that Alarm Grid is proud to have partnered with a central station like Criticom. The amazing reliability of their triply redundant service will be seen in full force! Criticom has already put any accounts affected by the storm on a "storm partition," meaning that they will be handling these calls a bit differently. Also, CMS has asked us to pass on the note that "first responders will no longer respond to our dispatches once sustained winds reach 45 MPH."

For those of you in the affected area, our thoughts and prayers are with you. Half of the Alarm Grid staff will be suffering through it all the same. Please stay safe. And for those of you watching from the safety of the midwest or west coast, wish us luck. ;P

The Alarm Grid support and sales staff is off today!

The central station is easy to reach. Simply call the number on the top of the site (888-818-7728) and dial extension 1. If you have questions you would like to ask, or system needs, please call and leave a message or email support@alarmgrid.com.

All the shipments that would have been shipped today, will ship tomorrow.

If you are a T-Mobile subscriber, you may have noticed that your Total Connect alerts have just stopped coming to your phone. This is the case for all of our users, and we have been getting calls about it for the last two days. If that is what you're experiencing, then please follow the steps below to restore your text messages.

• Go to the Total Connect 2.0 website, and log in to your account.
• Hover over the user whom you want to receive the text messages and select "Edit."
• Under "Notifications," add a new method for receiving messages. Select "Email." Select "Text Email" as "Notification Type."
• Put in [your10digitphonenumber]@tmomail.net. For example: 9549335095@tmomail.net.
• Save, and then go through the process of verifying the email. The verification number will come to your phone. Once verified, you should be good to go.

If you have any questions, or a problem with setting this up, we will gladly help you fix it. Please email us at support@alarmgrid.com. But for the most part if you follow the instructions here, everything should work with no trouble.

Alarm Grid's tech support will be closed on Christmas Eve (Dec. 24th) and Christmas day (Dec. 25th).

Should you have a pressing technical issue, please email support@alarmgrid.com. Otherwise, please call our office number 888-818-7728 and leave a message. We will get back to you as soon as we get back from the holidays.

Worry not, the central station will be up and running, monitoring your alarm system through the holidays.

We wish you all a wonderful holiday season, and hope that it is filled with family and friends.

Happy Birthday America!

We know that you are all going to be picnicking and watching fireworks for the next couple days... and so are we. Alarm Grid's offices are going to be closed on Friday the 3rd.

As usual, your accounts are all monitored 24/7. If you need central station services, please call 888-818-7728 (the big blue number at the top of the site), and dial extension 1. If you have any other questions, please feel free to email support@alarmgrid.com. A ticket will be generated and we will get to them as soon as we can.

Have a wonderful 4th of July, celebrate well, and do what your mothers' taught you to do when handling fireworks. Oh... and if you eat a hot dog this weekend, think of Alarm Grid. We'll do our darndest to keep the thieves at bay while you go out and celebrate!

We will be serving you diligently during the next two days (May 28 and 29). But we're admittedly not going to be running at full capacity. We will be running at half capacity all day. So we're asking all of our amazing customers to have some patience. The techs you have come to know and love are doing training during this time so that we can bring you even better, faster service.

Before you call, we would love if you considered first sending an email to support@alarmgrid.com. We can answer emails more quickly than we can get back to phone calls, especially considering that many of the Alarm Grid techs will be able to check mail during training. If you do call, and no one takes your call, please leave us a message. Rest assured that we will get you in the queue and call you back in the order you called us. Also, we're going to do our best to have the on-site chat channels manned all day. Feel free to use that.

We are going to add 2Gig's GoControl security system and peripheral products over the course of the next few weeks. This expansion from Honeywell-only, will give our customers choice with one of the most recognized (though new) brands in the security space. Like Honeywell's Total Connect, 2Gig is generally intended for use with alarm.com. While we absolutely love the incredible features of Total Connect, Alarm.com is another gerat platform that we are proud to begin offering sometime in the next couple months. Again, for you, that means you will have the choice between two of the best security products in the space.

For 2Gig fans out there who have been anticipating our foray into the much loved brand, we promise that we will be giving it the same sort of love we have given all our previous security systems. FAQs, documents, compatibility pages, videos and more are coming! If you have been waiting for Alarm.com + Alarm Grid, you won't have to wait much longer!

Happy holidays everyone!

Remember, while your systems are monitored 24/7 by the good folks at Criticom, our tech team is going to be taking a little break this holiday. Below are the Alarm Grid hours. If you need help, please email support@alarmgrid.com (emailing is the fastest way to get a response) or leave a message when you call 888-818-7728. We will do our best to respond quickly.

• Dec. 24th - Half day. Closing at 2PM EST.
• Dec. 25th - CLOSED
• Dec. 26th-Dec. 30th - Open
• Dec. 31 - Closing at 5PM EST
• Jan 1st - CLOSED
• Jan 2nd - Normal hours resume (Monday-Friday - 9AM-9PM EST, Saturday & Sunday - CLOSED)

We wish you all very well this holiday season, and hope you all have a wonderful week filled with cheer, happiness, and of course, safety. We sent out a nice little e-card to those who are signed up for our monitoring service. So, for those of you who didn't get to see the card, here it is. Please, leave the Alarm Grid team a message. We love hearing from all of you, and we promise that we are reading them all!

Happy 4th of July Alarm Grid! And Happy Birthday America!

We just wanted to relay the message: we're Closed Today.... Too Busy Being All Patriotic....

We wish you all the best of health. Stuff yourself with hot dogs, wave flags, and shoot rockets off in your back yard (if you're in a state where it's legal). Just be safe and follow the rules!

Remember, if you are getting the itch and work on your panel today, call the central station and put your panel on test. THE CENTRAL STATION IS ALWAYS OPEN. So if you need them, feel free to call our main line, (888-818-7728) and press 1. A friendly, helpful operator will pick up right away. For those of you who are having fun instead of working on your security system, toast a beer (or diet coke if you're me) to America and eat a hot dog.

During the last few days, Alarm Grid customers who are using AT&T as their cell phone service provider have indicated to our support team that the messages are coming in from different phone numbers. While not a huge inconvenience for most Total Connect users, for those who have setup alerts based on the phone number from which the message is coming are probably not getting the audible notifications that the audible notification of a message from Total Connect has stopped. The way to get around the issue is to change your AT&T SMS email recipient in your Total Connect 'Users' settings to an email address instead. Use the email address of your 10-digit number@mms.att.net. As the Total Connect SMS radial button option is really just a front end that tells the AlarmNet service to send an email to your 10-digit number@txt.att.net, this email setup is essentially doing the same thing as the SMS radial button. However, the key difference, and the reason is solves the problem of the ever changing contact on the Total Connect messages is that by sending it as an email you are having the messages come through AT&T's MMS gateway instead of their SMS gateway. For whatever reason, this solves the problem and all your messages will come from the same contact: totalconnect2.0@alarmnet.com so that you can setup a unique ring tone for your critical Total Connect notifications.

EDIT (Nov 1): We have noticed that a number of Alarm Grid customers have stopped receiving Total Connect messages if they are using the AT&T SMS setup on Total Connect. This was just an inconvenience before, as the messages would come through but they just would come from a different contact every time. Now it seems it has turned into a more serious issue where the messages don't come through at all if they are set up as SMS.

We're not sure what is causing this to happen, but we are aware of the problem and are working with AlarmNet to implement a solution for anyone who is experiencing the outage. We will give an update here as soon as we hear more. In the mean time, if you do the MMS email trick that we posted above, the messages will come through.

EDIT (Jan 13): Unfortunately, we have received reports that now even with the AT&T emails being set up to go to the @mms.att.net email gateway, customers with AT&T cell phones have stopped getting their Total Connect messages. We are still waiting for a fix from AlarmNet but in the mean time, we have developed a workaround. If you add your Gmail address as a Total Connect email recipient (and validate it), you can then use Gmail's filtering and forwarding features to have the emails pass through the Gmail account on their way to the cell phone. For some reason, this seems to bypass whatever was blocking the messages originally. If you are familiar with setting up Gmail filtering in your account, feel free to do it. If you are not, or would rather we help you with it, please give us a call (888-818-7728) or email support@alarmgrid.com, and we will work with you to make sure that you can get your email and text alerts.