Bleeping Alarms!
Alarm systems come with a range of sounds. A siren, an alarm beeping or a buzzing will alert you to an issue which could be an intruder, a fire or a fault.
Our maintenance cover includes our 24 hour help line where customers can call for help and should they need to, an engineer will attend to fix any issues. One of our most common customer calls is to unidentified sounds. “My alarm’s making a beeping sound!” Our engineers discussed this during a recent training session. A list of customers’ common faults and problems was drawn up.
The list looked like this:
Buzzing detectors, Buzzing alarms, alarm bleeping, control panel beeping… Can you see a theme emerging?
WHY is that alarm beeping?
Intruder alarms have additional warnings, such as door chimes or set/unset sounds as well as the siren. These sirens are designed to draw attention from those around and cause an intruder to flee. If you hear your neighbour’s alarm, have a look out or check they are ok. Many systems are linked to apps or monitoring stations but the siren is a great on-site noise maker.
Carbon monoxide alarms and fire alarms give life-saving warnings. These alarms should be routinely tested to make sure they are working correctly. The added benefit of routinely testing a smoke or carbon monoxide alarm is that people in the building become familiar with the noise they make.
What’s that noise?
Customers often struggle to identify the source of the sound. Our homes and businesses are now so full of technology a beep or buzz could be traced back to a variety of sources. Many fridges have a “door open” warning beep, oven timers have a buzz. Children’s toys are notorious for the myriad of noises they emit – usually when the toy’s owner is asleep and the parent is trying to quietly tidy up. Photocopiers bleep their warnings as do air conditioning machines.
Important sounds
It is important to locate the source of an unidentified sound as it may be critical to your safety. If you believe the sound is down to an unknown issue then it is important to get help from the right team.
We’re going on a sound hunt…
One customer recently called for help with her alarm panel beeping. She couldn’t make it stop so Keybury went to her rescue. Our engineer checked the intruder alarm and her smoke detectors. Neither were the culprit. The sound was found to be coming from her daughter’s science project which was in her school bag directly beneath the alarm panel. Another customer called for help to silence their fire alarm which was ringing very loudly. After some investigation, the engineer discovered that rather than the fire alarm being to blame, the emergency call button had been pressed in the disabled toilet.
Alarm beeping? It’s nothing new…
One of our surveyors, Mortimer, recalls attending an out of hours fault during his engineering days. He spent a long time on site; firstly testing the intruder alarm and then helping the customer to locate the source of the beeping. The source of the noise was eventually tracked down to a refill warning coming from the customer’s drinking water machine. Even our MD Frank recalls attending a call out to an unidentified buzzing noise. The customer had assumed this was coming from the alarm panel but it was tracked down to his oven timer.