I accidentally triggered an alarm today but I wasn’t able to cancel it until about 60 seconds later. I received push notifications and emails confirming the alarm, but I never received a call from Alarm.com. I called them myself about 20 minutes later and they confirmed that the alarm was received on their end, but no call was placed since I disabled the alarm from the panel. I pressed them on how long they wait to call, but they would only say that if the panel is disarmed “before we are able to respond” that a call is not placed.
It seems like 1 minute should be close to the maximum, since that is just about enough time for an intruder to enter and force a homeowner to disarm their panel. Surely there is a policy to call if an alarm has been occurring without a disarm after…how long?
Happy to help! Just to clarify, it is not Alarm.com that calls. The monitoring station is Avantguard Monitoring. Alarm.com is the backend software platform.
Typically, expect between 20-30 seconds with no extenuating circumstances. There are features which delay calls, such as the ARM chat text message feature, and two way voice. Those are disabled on your account however.
In this case the Disarm abort signal came in 36 seconds after the alarm signal.
Keep in mind that if you have dialer delay active on a system, the alarm will be sounding locally for the dialer delay period before the signal is forwarded to the central station. You can look in Alarm.com activity history and see the “Pending Alarm” events, which indicate dialer delay is active.
Your dialer delay is set for 30 seconds, that is the default value on Concord 4 panels.
Thank you for the clarification Jason. Is the dialer delay a legacy setting, or is it specifically to introduce a delay in order to cancel false alarms? If I choose, can this can be eliminated or reduced on the Concord 4?
Dialer delay is a setting designed to reduce false alarms, yes. It cannot be disabled on Concord 4 panels. By default it is 30 seconds. You can change it to 15 or 45.