Will the Central Station Call Me if I Disarm My Alarm just After a False Alarm?

If you disarm your alarm within seconds of a false alarm, there is a good chance the monitoring station will receive the cancel signal, and will abort alarm processing. If this happens, you will not receive a phone call from the monitoring station, and the alarm will be listed as cancelled.

When an alarm is tripped, a signal is sent out from your security panel to the central monitoring station. The signal hits the receiver, goes through an Automation system, which retrieves the details of the account, then gets put into a queue, which is accessed by an operator. The operator will then process the alarm based on the instructions for that particular location. The interval between when an alarm is triggered, and when an operator begins to process can be affected by a number of factors, including how many other alarms are being triggered at the same time. However, it is possible that a user will receive a call from the central monitoring station just seconds after an alarm has been set off.

When you disarm your system after an alarm occurs, it sends a special signal to the monitoring station called a cancel signal. This tells the operator that someone with a valid code has disarmed the system after the alarm. If you disarm the system before the operator has a chance to place the first phone call, and the operator sees the cancel signal, they will cease processing the alarm, will not call you, and will mark the alarm as false. This is done in an effort to avoid false dispatches. If the operator begins to process the alarm, they call the numbers listed, and they are not able to get in touch with someone, they will be forced to dispatch, even though the alarm was cancelled by a valid code.

If you would like to be contacted every time an alarm occurs, even if the alarm was cancelled, you can request this type of processing. Contact your alarm company to make this request, but bear in mind that this process may result in more frequent false dispatches.