Anyone researched Burglar Alarms lately?

[I.B. Washincars]

We are glad our recreational marijuana referendum was voted down in November of this year ... because the whole state's law enforcement said that all their K9s would have to retrained at a huge expense had that gone through.

The state wouldn’t have gained any revenue from the marijuana???

 

[I.B. Washincars]

Greg Pack, I can’t believe a man of your superior intelligence would do something so stupid. Not that you had a set of keys get stolen. I did that a year ago when I left my equipment room door unlocked. But you got on here and told everyone about it! You’re a bigger man than me.

 

[Robert2181]

Does everybody have a monitoring co, or do you just monitor the site your self. (it can be expensive).

 

[Kevin James]

I hate to say this but only a fool would run a car wash without an alarm system, at a minimum a noise maker. We have alarm and camera systems at all of our properties. When you walk in the equipment room to alarm system begins to beep, you’ve got just enough time to get to the alarm panel to disarm the system. If you don’t make it fast enough and the alarm goes off you can hear the siren/horn 2 blocks away from the car wash and in the equipment room the noise is deafening to the point that it painful. We monitor the alarm systems ourselves.

 

[PaulLovesJamie]

Greg, I use monnit sensors, they've worked flawlessly for me.
A hundred or so per device to set up, notifications are free. Lots of different types of sensors available.
I get a txt message within about 10 seconds when:
a) the ER door opens
b) one of the water sensor ropes gets wet (ie I have a leak)
c) the temp of my floor heat drops below the threshold I set (I think I set it at 45?)

Combined with the ability to look at the cameras on my cell phone, I think/hope thats enough.

 

[JMMUSTANG]

Many years ago I got hit for more than $1500 at one of my washes.
Now I leave the door to the changer unlocked and open. I put $100-150 in each bin. Refill each morning to that amount unless it’s going to be a busy day then I fill it up more.
Put a sign on the open door that says... Look up *******...you’re on candid camera.
I figure the cost to fix my Hamilton changer and door would cost A LOT more having it all locked up than the $200-300 in the changer

 

[Greg Pack]

So far,so good with Ring. I'm going to get one for my home. I would like more capability, but if I can wirelessly hook up some vacs and meter doors it will really take care of my needs. The notifications on my phone are almost instant. professional monitoring is $10/month, or you can opt for none and just get notifications that happen within seconds of an event.

Back in the Summer, I ordered a replacement camera system for my ancient analog system. Its a QSEE 4K system. It was sitting on the office floor when they broke in. It would have been really ironic if they stole that. I've installed eight of those cameras and the image quality is excellent. If I can get two more installed today I'll have good coverage of my property

 

[slash007]

Got broken into yesterday, 5 minutes before I got there as I was on the way anyway. Alarm went off and cameras caught the plate and also the faces. They tried to string my changers with no luck before getting ****ed and taking a crow bar to my meter box and ripping out the bill acceptor. Will post the pics and videos in another thread, just mentioning it here since it shows the merit of security cameras. Not to see if the police ever find him. He was driving a really nice truck with what seem to be out of town plates which makes me think he's going around doing this to different washes.

 

[Main Street Carwash]

Don't feel too bad Greg, it usually happens to everyone eventually. I got hit for over 6k about a year ago and they took my changer hoppers(including the spare) and some coin drawers. My dad and I had been sharing the set of keys because we were too lazy to make copies in a timely manner and were keeping them in one of the changers which dad left open that night on accident. At least $6k in cash and replacing Changer hoppers, coin drawers and every single lock in the place hurt a little bit. The guys hit a lot of car washes in the greater Houston area that week according to my local distributor. He was sold out of everything burglary related for weeks. Some people had them on camera but to no avail apparently. My local police didn't want to even come out and I had to be very insistent for them to dust for prints. Of course, they didn't get any. Lesson learned.

 

[dukeofsuds]

The only problem that I've encountered with Ring so far has been when the temperature dips below 32. Most of those sensors can't handle the cold. That's more of a problem when you use in the bay doors, not inside the control room. Don't know where everyone is located, but something to keep in mind.

 

[mjwalsh]

Got broken into yesterday, 5 minutes before I got there as I was on the way anyway. Alarm went off and cameras caught the plate

Am I reading that correctly... if all of the plate numbers & state ID was captured ... I would think that the local police will for sure find them & set up some type of requirement of reimbursement possibly without having to go to civil (small claims)??? ... even if they are out of state numbers & letters on the plate!

 

[Greg Pack]

Am I reading that correctly... if all of the plate numbers & state ID was captured ... I would think that the local police will for sure find them & set up some type of requirement of reimbursement possibly without having to go to civil (small claims)??? ... even if they are out of state numbers & letters on the plate!

Most agencies in my State simply fill out a report for misdemeanors. Any investigation and
warrants have to be performed by the victim. Here in Alabama, theft of less than $2500 and/or criminal mischief (damage) of less than $2500 are misdemeanors. My incident is a felony because of the burglary (entering a premises with the intent to commit a crime) and amount of money stolen. So in my State stringing attempts or other minor property crimes get very little attention from LE.

 

[slash007]

Am I reading that correctly... if all of the plate numbers & state ID was captured ... I would think that the local police will for sure find them & set up some type of requirement of reimbursement possibly without having to go to civil (small claims)??? ... even if they are out of state numbers & letters on the plate!

Unfortunately the state ID wasn't clear, so not sure where he was from. Got lucky to get the plate, he hit one camera at just the right angle, but not clear enough to see the state.

 

[I.B. Washincars]

Unfortunately the state ID wasn't clear, so not sure where he was from. Got lucky to get the plate, he hit one camera at just the right angle, but not clear enough to see the state.

So basically, they didn’t want to fool with it.

 

[JGinther]

Tags are good to catch the accidental things that happen, not the intentional. Of maybe 50 occasions where tags were caught for intentional misdeeds, zero of them weren't one of the following:
1. the plate was stolen,
2. the vehicle was stolen,
3. the tags were not real,
4. (most commonly) the tags belong to the vehicle, but the owner of the vehicle doesn't have control of who is using the vehicle. Typically 'drug cars' that tweakers share or rent to each other for money even though it isn't theirs. Cops give up on these because it always leads to the same people they are always dealing with and nobody wants to foot the bill to keep them locked up. Everyone has plausible deniability because they can prove they were someplace else at the time. Half the time, its an innocent grandparent's vehicle where they are trying to help out someone.

 

[mjwalsh]

So basically, they didn’t want to fool with it.

We had an incident of property damage but was not intentional but was a hit & run. Missing plate info. Police said they would try. In the meantime I went to an online license search. I posted on the coin laundry assoc forum. A good samaritan computer programmer who was a fellow CLA forum member ... put together a program & came up with a way to automate the search for the correct vehicle & person. Officer-case # contacted: Sure enough within 24 hours the guy showed up & apologized, said he did not realize what he had hit. Honestly ... he actually volunteered to reimburse me even more than what I was asking.

So sometimes there is more than one way to find out with certainty who was responsible. In the case of deliberate damage ... money motivated or not .... like what this thread is about ... I am pretty sure with our new Marcy's victim law... the officer along with BACKUP would have confronted the plate owner. That is rather than allowing the guy to volunteer to contact & get together with me. The officer did tell me to follow-up with him if the guy did not show up. Some officers within various local Police Departments are better than others IMHO as always of course!

I am not saying that there is not some validity to what JGinther pointed out though ... to be extra fair.

 

[Greg Pack]

Tags are good to catch the accidental things that happen, not the intentional. Of maybe 50 occasions where tags were caught for intentional misdeeds, zero of them weren't one of the following:
1. the plate was stolen,
2. the vehicle was stolen,
3. the tags were not real,
4. (most commonly) the tags belong to the vehicle, but the owner of the vehicle doesn't have control of who is using the vehicle. Typically 'drug cars' that tweakers share or rent to each other for money even though it isn't theirs. Cops give up on these because it always leads to the same people they are always dealing with and nobody wants to foot the bill to keep them locked up. Everyone has plausible deniability because they can prove they were someplace else at the time. Half the time, its an innocent grandparent's vehicle where they are trying to help out someone.

A practice of some thugs is to swap tags with their relatives. When the plate is run on a criminal investigation it comes back to the wrong vehicle and that often stops the investigation for a minor property crime. However, If they get pulled over on a traffic stop and have the wrong tag, they have a semi-legitimate excuse for having it on their vehicle: "Oh, I picked up my Mom's tag and mine at the same time at the license office and put them on. I must have gotten the two confused".

 

[Rainway]

I’m using SimpliSafe, it works great. Am thinking about switching to Ring though (bought up by Amazon, I think) because they have better cameras. I installed a couple Ring spotlight cameras. I’m really happy so far. You can customize when you get alerts based on specific areas of the camera view (like don’t bother me if a car drives by the road next to my carwash, but do give me a notice that someone is driving through my parking lot at 10pm). It’s very accurate. My regular security system has some of those features but it was too much of a headache to configure it. Now with Ring I can do it all from any device and give employee access too. Can’t beat $100/year for unlimited cameras at a location. Now when druggies come into my lot and just sit there and don’t use the vacuums or anything (just waiting for their dealer or customer), I can just trigger the alarm on the Ring camera. It’s not extremely loud, but gets attention.

 

[bert79]

I am a new owner and purchased a 16 camera NVR system from Lorex (from the positive comments on this forum). Everything is installed now and up and running. Like Rainway mentioned above my cameras can be configured to only record when there is motion (in fact I think that is the default), beyond that each camera can be configured to record (or respond) to motion in certain areas of the frame (like if the camera view picks up traffic on a nearby roadway you may not want it to record EVERY time there is motion). Anyway beyond that and more to the point of the thread, when I was looking at all the settings I noticed that if you have the right cameras and/or accessories the system can be set up as a motion alarm (including sirens/strobes). Greg, I saw that you purchased the Qsee system and If I'm right that is very similar to the Lorex. Just my newbie two cents.