January 2016 by Michael B.
It has been a few years, but since nobody else has reviewed this company and it seems to have the same owner I'll write down why I didn't (and won't) contract with them again. The alarm system I had from Chicago Fire & Burglar needed an update. The dialer needed reprogramming. CF&B informed me that they could not reprogram it---too old, and they didn't have the equipment any more---but offered to sell an updated system. I was not entirely believing of their claim that they had thrown out the reprogrammer for a system they themselves had sold only ten years earlier. Don't they plan to support their systems? A little web searching, using the model number off the equipment itself, revealed that indeed it was not hard to find companies willing to reprogram it. Nevertheless, the proposed new system offered goodies that the old one didn't have. The system manufacturer had created a platform for home monitoring and automation in addition to alarm monitoring. And the motion detectors in my old system caused too many false alarms. I decided to ask for a quote. CF&B was not willing to provide a useful quote. They quoted a price, but they refused to tell me what they were quoting. For example, a little reading persuaded me that some of the new manufacturer's motion detectors were much more stable than others, but the salesperson would not tell me which model they proposed to install. He kept saying things like it was a top of the line system. I was unwilling to buy the new system without that quite fundamental spec. Another problem concerned attaching home automation devices. The system had several password numbers. There was one for configuring home automation devices. (There was another for configuring how it contacted the alarm monitoring company, the point being, these alarm companies don't want you to buy their hardware and switch the supervision to somebody else.) I stipulated that I needed the password for configuring home automation. The salesperson flatly refused. CF&B would only sell me a system that was totally locked down, if I wanted to attach non-alarm monitors they had to be bought from and installed by CF&B. At first the salesperson told me what I wanted wasn't even possible. However the instant I told him the page number and paragraph from the manual he "remembered." A quick call to other alarm companies revealed others did not have this restriction. I had been paying monitoring 3 months at a time in advance, and without reprogramming my current system or installing a new one monitoring stopped in the middle of that period. I had already paid for supervision, Chicago Fire & Burglar Alarm company was in theory responsible for supervision, but fire and burglar alarm monitoring just stopped. The owner of the company did not take my calls. It is a small office, the owner plus a few others, and I had dealt with him amicably a few times over the years. But the salesperson had been quite contentious, and my calls to the owner never got past the secretary and were not returned. So that is why I don't recommend Chicago Fire & Burglar. Up until that point, I had had little trouble.
