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If we have a power outage that causes a detector to 'function' because of that blip, why not hold the power company at fault not the owner that has these life saving instruments? If a car malfunctions is the car industry held accountable? If the equipment proves faulty at a certain point of time and sends a false alarm in unkownst to either the homeowner or the security office then how do you get that not to happen? You go from 50 calls (4 per month) to 100 calls (8 per month) a year, some fire departments in the state see over 1000 calls (83 per month) a year with some of them being false.

Is the same punishment for businesses too? The thing with electronics is as with anything 'made' is the chance of malfunction, look at space rocket that blew up just after take off.

What I see happening is that once people start getting fined they will disconnect their systems from the monitoring agency and that will lead to more 'major incidents' with delay in time for Fire Companies responding. Or they will stop getting early fire detection/life-saving systems.

Now take a boiler-puff-back, will set off a smoke detector even though there is no fire and no need for the Fire Dept to respond so being a false alarm that needs a boiler cleaning. Then you have the chance that a spider will walk in front of the detector detection piece and set it off. Spider being gone when you get there would be considered a false alarm.

If it wasn't about the money then why so many levels and the heightened cost of a fine AND where does this money go?

What about Fire Companies that have few to little to about no false alarms?

I being a fireman with 40 years or so experience when my Fire detection system goes off I have the monitoring company call my house first to see if someone is home to confirm fire or not, if no answer on the phone they call 911 and report the alarm activation. This stops the smoke-from-cooking false alarms and other false alarm activations.

We do follow the State's Mutual Aid System that allows other Fire Companies to be called to go to another call of yours if you can't get the manpower out that's needed.

There are way too many situations that can happen that can be construed to be a false alarm that wasn't a false alarm that would be fined as one.

If an alarm keeps activating, the company being used should be fixing the problem or pay for the problem as well.

The other problem is always going to the same place time after time for false alarms, manpower doesn't want to show up UNTIL that one call and it's blowing out the windows!

Right now the only false alarm is one that someone calls in knowing there is no need to have called and that's already against the law. What about false alarms at schools? Or set off by smoking or burnt popcorn or from smoke outside?

I wonder if a survey has been taken of the Fire Depts and see just how many false alarms their are a year and where.

My company gets very few false alarms - explain that by 1) systems are kept up with maintenance or 2) safeguards are in place or 3) People DON'T Have systems, which waits for the 'working fire with people trapped' type of call.

How this will reduce the number of false alarms will be by disconnecting their systems, which is a bad choice to make.

Stay Safe.