The gatehouse
An alarm at 12 Alder Way arrives with the street address and the instruction the board agreed on. The guard can send the patrol, or open the gate and point the fire department at the right house.
Gated communities & HOAs
The guard at the gate is the closest responder you have.
Gated communities, homeowners associations, and neighborhoods with a staffed gatehouse or clubhouse. Every home has its own alarm system. When one of them trips, the person best placed to look is already inside the gate.
A gated community, on screen.
Thornbury Gate, sixteen homes behind one entrance. A break-in, a camera that picks out somebody who should not be there, fire and carbon monoxide, a panic button, and water where there should not be any.
A gated community is a set of separate houses behind one staffed entrance. Each house has its own alarm system and its own monitoring, and each one reports to a center that is a long drive away. The gatehouse, a few streets from the front door, is usually the last to hear about it.
Alarm Station puts those alarms on a touchscreen at the gate. A break-in, a fire, a panic button, a camera that has spotted somebody on a driveway at two in the morning: each one arrives by street address, with what the board decided should happen next.
Guards change, and so do the companies that supply them. This is a screen somebody can work on a first shift, which is the only kind that survives a roster.
- Every home on one screen, by street address rather than account number.
- Intrusion, fire, carbon monoxide, panic buttons, water, and camera alarms from Alarm.com on the same screen.
- The guard can open the gate for the fire department and tell them which house.
- One gatehouse can cover more than one community, if that is how the management company is organized.
- A central station stays behind the gate staff for the hours the gatehouse is dark, or for every hour, whichever the board prefers.
The board
A record of every alarm and who responded to it, which answers the question at the next meeting better than anybody’s memory of a Tuesday night.
Homeowners
The first person to know is inside the gate already, knows which street is which, and can be at the door while it is still a question.
Talk to us.
If you sell alarm systems, or you run a staffed community and wish the alarms showed up at the desk, we would like to hear from you.