All about Alarm.com - Services Overview Part 2

Basic Interactive and Above

Alarm.com Interactive Services offer some basic features across all service plans. These features are then added to in each higher service plan. Although Alarm.com Interactive Services can be used for self-monitoring, they do offer their wireless signal forwarding to a central monitoring station at no additional charge for all of their interactive service plans. This is a great deal for cellular communication forwarding. This includes the protection of Crash & Smash.

Remote monitoring and control is also offered to all service plans. This allows users to access their alarm panel through the mobile app, mobile website, or desktop website. It allows users to perform tasks remotely such as arming and disarming or user code management. The status of the system and any recent activity can also be viewed up to 60 days in the past. Alarm.com also allows a customer to set up different sub-users with different permissions. This could be used to allow your children to arm and disarm the system remotely without allowing them to do things like change user codes.

Finally, all service plans offer some customizable notification capability and geo-services. These notifications can be sent by email or text. They can notify customers, based on the user’s preference; of alarms, arming/disarming, system events, no-show alerts, arming reminders, and sensor left open. System events include notifications of power failure, low battery warnings, and system tamper messages. Customers can set up no-show alerts which will notify them if a specified person did not disarm the system during the expected time frame. Arming reminders will let the user know if the system did not get armed by a certain time. Alarm.com can also notify you if a sensor is left open for too long. For instance, if you left, but did not get the front door closed properly and it swings back open: Alarm.com will then notify you that the front door appears to be open. And last, Alarm.com offers their geo-services feature to all interactive services customers. This feature allows the user to set up notifications based on the location of their mobile phone. This can be used in many ways such as a reminder that you left home without arming the system so that when you arrive at your destination you can remotely arm the system.

Advanced Interactive and Above

For a small addition to the monthly fee of the Basic Interactive service plan, customers can receive all the additional features of the Advanced Interactive service plan. The Advanced Interactive service plan offers all the great features of Basic Interactive and gives you even more monitoring capability. Not only does Advanced Interactive offer you all the notifications that are available with the Basic Interactive service plan, but you also can receive 24/7 sensor activity notifications on up to 10 sensors. The Alarm.com communication module can send all activity to Alarm.com and even notify specified recipients of activity. There are many reasons why you may want to be able to have constant monitoring of a sensor’s activity. Maybe you have a locked cabinet in your home that you do not want anyone but yourself, or those that you give permission, to get into. You can place a sensor on the cabinet door and set up Alarm.com to notify you every time that that cabinet is opened. So even if you are not at home, you will be notified that that cabinet has been opened.

Interactive Gold

The Interactive Gold service plan is where many of the most advanced features come standard. Again, you get all the features of the Basic and Advanced Interactive service plans. Interactive Gold gives customers even more notification possibilities as well as energy management, automation, and image sensor features.

If you are using central station monitoring, Interactive Gold offers two-way voice as long as your central station supports it. This will allow you and the central station to talk directly through the alarm panel to help prevent false alarms as well as possibly giving the central station additional information to pass on to the proper authorities.

Interactive Gold offers severe weather alerts and weather to the panel. If your equipment is compatible, Alarm.com will give weather and severe weather alerts directly on your panel’s screen from the National Weather Service (U.S. only). This gives your panel the capability to protect your family from not only intruders, fire, gas, water, and temperature; but also from severe weather as well. It also gives you the convenience of seeing the weather forecast on the panel.

Alarm.com also throws in identity protection for you and your family. Alarm.com has partnered with PrivacyMaxx to offer pro-active alerts for potential identity theft. Not only will they watch for potential threats, they also have 24/7 restoration support. In the event that your identity is stolen, they will work to restore your identity to its pre-theft state.

Interactive Gold offers many energy management and home automation features through compatible devices. You can control z-wave lights, z-wave locks, z-wave thermostats, and garage doors directly from the app and website. You can also set up schedules to receive many energy cutting benefits. In addition, Alarm.com offers z-wave water management support to Interactive Gold customers, allowing them to check for usage and leaks as well as opening and closing valves remotely. Alarm.com also features integration with LiftMaster and Lutron products.

Finally, Interactive Gold adds support for image sensing motion detectors. This includes being able to capture images during alarms using motion-activated image sensors; image capture on disarm; daily view rules to automatically upload images at certain times; on-demand peek-in to see live images; ability to upload additional images that were not automatically uploaded; and image alerts during alarms, daily views, or peek-ins.

What kinds of add-ons are there?

Alarm.com offers many features as add-ons to any of the service plans to allow for even more customization based on your needs. All of the features that are offered in the Interactive Gold package are offered as add-ons to Basic and Advanced Interactive customers.

In addition to the features offered with Interactive Gold, Alarm.com offers services that are only available as add-ons. You can add voice notifications for alarms and/or non-alarm situations. This allows you to receive phone calls to notify you of the events that you deem important. On top of all the great energy management and automation features, you can add energy monitoring to your service plan. You can monitor your actual energy usage as a house and per device to see the actual benefits of the Alarm.com energy management features. Alarm.com allows you to add their IP video cameras and integrate them into your account. The video service has all the customization of their image capture service for your Alarm.com IP video cameras. This will allow you to view live and recorded video as well as receive custom notifications. Alarm.com also offers stand-alone video plans that do not require any of the interactive service plans. Finally, Alarm.com offers a wellness add-on. This will help you to ensure independent living while giving you daily activity monitoring and real time notifications. This could be a great add-on to help you provide care for an elderly member of your family or anyone that may need additional care.

Alarm.com offers a huge amount of great and innovative features and integration, some of which are not available anywhere else and at a great price. They offer many service plans and add-ons to allow you to only pay for the features that you want. And they integrate everything into a powerful, easy to use package. If you’re looking to squeeze the most out of your alarm system, look no further than Alarm.com Interactive Services.