Home alarm systems and retail alarm systems protect against most of the very same things. There are some rather unique issues pertaining to businesses. Businesses must have adequate alarm protections from burglary and fire, however they must have additional systems to warn and alert the police about robberies in progress. They must have silent alarm systems activated by undetectable means, if the store is being robbed during business hours. Other factors must be engineered into the alarm system for a store such as unknown surveillance systems to cut down on employee thievery.
Retail businesses require that the alarm systems meet certain performance criteria as established by the city or town police, fire and engineer authorities. This performance involves mostly the reliability of a true alarm versus a false one. Older systems have to be maintained in order to rule out shorts or other electrical problems, which can cause failure in either fire or burglary alarms. Regularly, designated people from the city verify and check business alarm systems. They issue yearly an alarm license, which you must have. If you have an unlicensed alarm and it goes off, then you are liable for a fine and mandatory license. It may sound like more bureaucracy but today officers of the law and firemen are in limited numbers. This is one attempt to minimize the waste of personnel from faulty alarms.
Retail alarm systems rely on motion detectors within the store to signal when there is movement after the store is alarmed and closed. These are a series of infrared transmitters and receivers placed throughout the rooms of the store. Some are located high and others are placed low in a criss-cross pattern, which will make it difficult for a robber to walk, crawl or creep through the store without detection. Many times, there are false alarms, which indicate an intruder when there is none, or when there is a sparrow trapped inside the store. These retail alarm systems are usually serviced by a private protection agency, who will investigate such false alarms when there is no indication of any exterior circuit broken. The alarm is monitored by that agency under any circumstance but at the indication of a crime, the matter is relayed to the police.
The doors and windows of an exterior building have continuous electrical circuits. This circuit is broken when the door or window is opened or broken. When this happens, an alarm is transmitted both silently and then audibly. This is more to discourage and scare off any intruders. Any movement by the intruder can be tracked inside the business by at least a sector designation. This is when the motion detection system can be slaved to the video surveillance camera. This will provide the authorities with definitive evidence of who committed the crime. Another protection provided by this multilayer remote sensor coverage is the special inventory items that a retail store may have such as jewelry, cameras, sports rifles and handguns or in the case of a pharmacy, drugs. These sensitive items can have additional protection through more detection and security provided by the new alarm systems.
Retail alarm systems rely on motion detectors