Darin and his wife tell Consumerist that they recently bought a house that included an already-installed home alarm system. Neat! They would like to get the code to this alarm system. Unfortunately, the previous owners are unreachable, and the company that installed the alarm will only reset the code if the couple signs up for monitoring service.

My wife and I recently bought a house that has a purchased alarm system (in other words, no ongoing monitoring service) originally from Protection One. We didn’t receive the alarm code when we bought the house and have had no luck getting it from the original owners (the house was purchased from a relocation company rather than the original owners, their realtor attempted to get the code from the original owners but has not been successful yet). So I contacted Protection One, hoping they could help. They told me they could reset the system and give us a new code but only if we sign up with ongoing monitoring (which, I’m pretty sure, involves a long term contract), otherwise they won’t help us.

Is there anything we can do? We’re not particularly interested in paying for a year or two of expensive monitoring just to be able to arm/disarm the alarm system on our own house.

Any ideas for Darin? Or is he, perhaps, better off never arming the alarm system at all?

Protection One’s policy isn’t unreasonable, but let this serve as a reminder to get alarm codes before a house changes hands.

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