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Alarm notification via cell

While the Festive Season generally tends to bring out the best in most law-abiding individuals, criminals seem to use the holidays – and, specifically, the temporary abandonment of homes and offices – to sharpen the tools of their trade and devise new methods of plundering these invitingly untenanted properties.

This December past, a community newspaper reported on a spate of burglaries plaguing a Pretoria suburb and involving intruders switching off the electricity distribution boxes that feed alarm systems at residential and business properties, causing the alarm’s backup battery to run down and enabling them to enter the property unhindered. The article concluded with police spokesperson Captain Colette Weilbach advising readers to, where possible, link alarm systems with their cellphones. The Centurion G-SWITCH-22 makes it easy for home and business owners to create this link.

By connecting one of the module’s twin inputs to an alarm’s power supply (additional switchgear may be required), and configuring it for input notifications (which can be done via Centurion’s G-WEB interface), up to 1 200 users can be alerted to power failures via SMS text message to their phones. Following some recent hardware upgrades, a single input on the G-SWITCH can now be used for both rising and falling edge notifications, meaning that the same input used for notifying users when power is cut, can also notify them when it comes back on.

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