Yesterday afternoon we discovered a light switch plate in our computer room which felt unreasonably warm to the touch. The switch was in the off position and neither my boyfriend nor I wanted to switch it on for fear of certain burning death. My stepdad, who has some electrician experience, came by and determined that the issue was that essentially the previous owners had, at some point, connected non-aluminum wiring to the existing aluminum wiring in the light switch and, over time, it had corroded resulting in a spectacular arc and definite fire hazard.
He replaced the switch and now it appears to be okay. My concern, of course, is that I own a 44 year old house with aluminum wiring which may or may not burn my family, pets and belongings to death at some point. I’m not super attached to my belongings and my family members are all old enough to hear one of the many smoke alarms I have throughout the house but I really dislike the idea of my pets being home all day without us as they are indoor cats and do not have the necessary motor skills or thumbery to open the door and escape.
Ideally I would like to rewire the entire house with copper wiring and be done with it. Unfortunately, the estimates I’ve received are in the ballpark of 6-9k which is frankly out of our budget until I can pay down/off some of our existing loans and free up some credit card space.
In the meantime, I would like to install a monitored burglary/fire/co2 alarm so that at least a fire in the home would alert the authorities prior to (I hope) any loss of pet life in the event that we are not at home.
Today I decided that I would research home security system reviews to find someone reliable and cost-appropriate, but I’m noticing that every “review” site is essentially linked to a specific brand of system/service and I’m having no luck finding a yelp-type consumer review site with info on monitoring systems.
So with all of that in mind, I turn to my esteemed fellow Dopers, whose opinions I trust more than Yelp anyway!
Do any of you currently use a fire/burglary/co2 home security system? Is it pricey? Reliable? Were there a lot of hidden costs involved?
There was a system connected (hardwired) in our house when we moved in but as far as I can tell, it’s broken. :smack:
Maybe you should have someone go over your home to make sure the wiring including all switches are installed properly. At the same time, have an electrician install arc fault interrupters to all circuits at the breaker box. These parts are not expensive to buy or have installed.
Thank you for this information! This sounds significantly less expensive than scrapping the whole wiring system and replacing with copper. I will check into this option for sure.
You should be able to find a licensed electrician who can refit your home with what are called “copalum” pigtails. They’re special connections that let you use normal switches and outlets while keeping the existing aluminum wiring. Probably not cheap, but cheaper than a full re-wire.
Hello,I think I have best security system in my house I have cctv cameras and with the monitoring service and the via service is also include in it,Running smoke alarms at every level of the home.According to my personal view the best security system is that which have complete security(indoor and outdoor).
so I also like to suggest to all my friend to use the technology for saving your precious lives and the property.so thanks.
Home alarm systems do not have a particularly impressive record for accuracy or reliability. It is not uncommon for 95% or more of burglar alarms to be false. PDF Cite
The National Fire Protection Association cites a study of alarm activations in VA Hospitals with
15.8 unwanted activations for every real alarm. That makes for a 94% false alarm rate. Another study reports fire departments making 4.5 false alarm responses for every structure fire response. PDF Cite
I had this done to my house 18 years ago. At that time it cost $15 per outlet. It’s probably more now, but it’s still much, much cheaper than re-wiring the entire house.