Back-to-base alarm monitoring

It means your alarm panel reports to a staffed monitoring centre rather than only making noise at your house. When a zone trips, the signal goes to the centre in seconds and an operator works through the response plan you set: call you, call the next name on your list, send a patrol, call police. "Back to base" is the Australian term for it; overseas you will see the same thing called central station monitoring.

Back to base starts at $1,400 a year + GST for a standard residential connection. Most providers advertise a monthly figure, so for comparison that is about $117 a month, also before GST. Self-monitoring, where the alerts go to your phone and nobody else sees them, is $200 a year + GST and is a separate service, so it is not included in the back to base price. A commercial site with open and close reporting or patrol response costs more, and we price that after looking at the site. You get the figure and the exit terms before you commit, because a monitoring contract you cannot leave is the most common complaint people bring us about their last provider.

It is not really either/or, because they are separate services and each is priced on its own. Self-monitoring is $200 a year + GST and sends the alerts to your phone in near real time, which is genuinely enough for some people. A free app on the same panel will notify you late, so the subscription is buying you the speed rather than the feature. It stops being enough the moment the alert arrives while you are asleep, overseas, in a meeting, or out of signal, which is most of when a break-in actually happens. Back to base starts at $1,400 a year + GST and is the difference between being told and being acted on. Taking both means you see it and someone acts on it. If you travel, run a business site, or have anything on the premises you could not replace, back to base is the one worth having.

It depends which app. The free ones bundled with some panels notify on a delay, so you can find out about a break-in well after it was worth knowing. Paid self-monitoring is $200 a year + GST, separate from back to base, and lands in near real time. Either way the app only tells you. Monitoring means somebody acts when you are asleep, overseas, or in a meeting with your phone face down.

The centre calls the first name on your list before escalating. That call is what stops false alarms turning into a police attendance and a fee.

Usually yes, if the panel supports reporting. We check the panel model first and tell you either way.