monitor commerical property

I am going to install a alarm system for my friends small commercial property. It will have around 25 or so contacts and 4 or 5 smoke detectors. Does it matter if the property is commercial in relation to it being monitored? Is there any other concerns with a commercial property?

suretyDIY provides monitoring for residential and commercial DIYers alike.

However, this is a pretty open-ended question, so I’ll try to give some considerations that may be different to commercial installation:

Commercial properties may have different zone type requirements, code requirements for life safety devices, etc., although if your wireless smoke detectors are in addition to existing ones this wouldn’t be an issue.

Who will be using the system? If a wide variety of individuals or a quickly revolving list of individuals will be using the system, I would generally recommend against resistive touchscreens like the Go!Control and TS1, and the first Qolsys IQ panel. The resistive touchscreens can be damaged by mishandling and are less forgiving toward users who are not familiar with how they react to touch.

Do you need partitions for this system? As in, do various sections of the business need to be armed separately from others? For example, do you need offices to be armed at a different time than a production floor of some sort?

Will hours be rigid? Consider using Alarm.com Arming Schedules add-on to automatically schedule the system to arm and disarm at specific times each day.

Jason, as always, thanks for the info and speedy reply!

I inquired about the code and there actually is no code for smoke detectors as it has no bedrooms and it’s a single story ranch like building. It was just built and inspected and move in is actually happening soon.

There will be 6 or 7 users on the system and they only need one partition as they will just arm the whole building rather then areas in the building. I was thinking of buying them keyfobs to make things easy. The hours are definitely not rigid as people come and go from around 0800 to 2000.

I was likely going to by the 2gig GC3 as that’s what I’ve had in my house and have been pretty happy with it aside from the slow firmware updates.

I was likely going to by the 2gig GC3 as that’s what I’ve had in my house and have been pretty happy with it aside from the slow firmware updates.

The good news here is that if needed, two models of GC3 secondary touchscreens are being released, one available now (should be available on suretyDIY soon in next round of additions) and one that will be released in summer which is modeled after and has most of the same features as the GC3 itself.