YaleAlarms Easy Fit Telecommunication Alarm Kit

I don’t usually write reviews for products I buy, but as I relied so heavily on consumer reviews before purchasing this alarm system that I felt I should share my opinion and experience now I have it.Just to be clear (as I’ve noticed reviews on amazon tend to be used across a range of products by the same manufacturer, rather than a specific model now), this is a review of the Yale YEFKIT2 (Telecommunication Alarm kit). The kit includes 2 PIRs, 2 Door/window contacts, 1 functioning Alarm/siren box, 1 “dummy” box and 1 control panel. This kit isn’t controllable via the app so you cannot use the PIRs with built in camera but it is compatible with all other YEF components. As the name implies, as well as the standard audible alarm sounding, this kit also calls you (on up to 3 phone numbers) to tell you when it goes off. It also allows you to arm or disarm it remotely by phone - which seemed like pretty useful additional functions to me.The kit is wireless apart from the main control panel which needs mains power and a telephone connection (it does have back-up batteries fitted to power it in the event of a power cut, but unlike the other components it cannot run on the batteries alone). So the position of the control panel was my biggest dilemma when planning out the system. I wanted the control panel to be near to the front door so that activating and deactivating it would be easy on exiting and entering the house. But if the wires are easily accessible, the phone line could be disconnected or cut by an intruder - and therefor the alarm wouldn’t be able to call me to alert me of its activation. I’d read about some people installing the main control panel in a hidden location and then positioning a remote keypad near the front door. I considered this option, but after viewing the remote keypad in a shop I decided that it wasn’t really what I wanted on display in my hall (this was a personal decision, based purely on aesthetics. I think from a practical point of view this is probably the simplest solution).However, as I have accessible crawl-space under my house and we were about to redecorate the hall, I decided to do something slightly more time-consuming. I added a power and telephone outlet under the house and then chased the wires up inside the wall to the point I wanted to mount the panel. I then plastered and painted over them when we decorated to leave the wall looking untouched. The wires were still accessible where they plug unto the underside of the unit however, and I don’t think a burglar would have too much problem removing the control panel from its mounting plate - so in addition to the supplied fitting I also filled the gap all the way around the unit with mastic. This had the desired effect of covering the mains and telephone plugs (where they enter the unit) and also makes removing the unit from the wall a much tougher task for any would-be intruder.The control unit itself is quite nice looking for an alarm system, and feels nice and sturdy. It’s all made of a pretty sturdy plastic with a ‘touch-screen’ style interface (although the buttons never actually change or move on the display) taking up most of the front panel and four physical buttons which are mostly used to navigate around the system set-up rather than the daily alarming and disarming the system.Once I had the control unit where I wanted it - and as secure as I could make it, fitting the rest of the system was genuinely a piece of cake. I would say I fitted the lot in about 45 minutes. I had read the instructions from cover to cover twice before I started - which I would recommend to anyone trying to install this kit. I would also recommend making a note of the preallocated names of each of the components and where you position them as you activate them. You can easily rename each part of the kit later (such as ‘LivingRoom 1’), but this is much easier if you already have a list of the names to be changed.The PIRs and door contacts that come in the box are already paired to the control panel so just need to be activated. I bought two additional PIRs which were really easy to pair and activate. You can name these at the point of pairing them, so make the set up really easy to keep a track of which bits are where. The PIRs and door contacts have guide marks in the plastic to punch through and screw them to the walls but I decided to use high-strength double sided sticky pads to fit them instead, so these were all up and in place in minutes.Ignoring my personal decision to mount the control panel in such a way, the trickiest bit of fitting the system is the siren box itself and that’s only because you have to do it up a ladder. For obvious reasons, the higher - and therefor more out-of-reach - you mount the siren, the better. But if you enjoy heights as little as I do, then marking fixing holes, fiddling around with the siren box and a cordless drill all while your legs steadily turn to jelly isn’t a whole lot of fun. But to their credit, Yale have made this as easy as possible by offering a range of fixing points on the base unit of the box and only one screw to finally secure the cover in place. Weighing up the benefits of the ‘dummy’ box and how much I disliked working at heights, I decided not to mount the second box. But if you have a property that is easily accessible from the front and back, I can see the dummy box could be a very useful additional deterrent.Once up and running the system set-up offers a lot of flexibility - allowing you to set up each of the components to your own preferences. There’s a ‘home’ setting where you can disable any number of the components to allow movement inside the house, but still not let intruders in. You can set some parts to instantly set off the siren, whilst others (mostly the front door sensor) start a countdown - giving you time to disarm the system before the siren activates. You can also set certain components to sound an internal chime to alert you in a slightly less alarming way if someone has come in through a door. You can add key-fobs, additional remote keypads, Alarm/help buttons and smoke alarms to the system, but I haven’t done this (yet).I’ve had the system installed for about a month now and in that time we went away for a week. It seems to work very well. We haven’t had any false alarms, but have managed to set it off once by accident when we opened the back door from inside, having forgotten that we had it set to ‘home’ mode. The alarm itself is very loud - both inside and outside the house, so our focus at the time was switching it off as quickly as possible. I only realised after the event that it did not dial out to my phone in this instance. I don’t know if this was due to the speed that we managed to switch it off or if it is a fault. As the alarm is so loud, and also activating it will obviously use the battery-life up, I haven’t yet done a secondary test to see how long it takes to dial out (there is a ‘call test’ as part of the system set-up which worked fine, so I know the functionality is there and working).My only complaint at this time is that the ‘every-day use’ noises from the control panel are far too loud, and there is no volume control for this. One of the first things I did was to turn the ‘key Tone’ off so it doesn’t beep at me every time I press a button. This still leaves the ‘alarm on’ sound - several short beeps to tell you the alarm is active once you have turned it on. I find it quite reassuring when leaving the house to shut the door and hear the beeps telling me the alarm is now on, but when setting the alarm to ‘home mode’ and people are in the house, or the kids are sleeping upstairs, the 3 short beeps are far too loud.Overall, I would thoroughly recommend this alarm. At £200 it’s exceptional value for money. It’s easy to install and offers that extra peace of mind when leaving the house for long periods of time, if you’re just popping out or even while you’re still inside sleeping. The telephone connection makes it more advanced than a basic alarm system, but doesn’t overcomplicate things or rely on the quality of an app or a wifi connection to be able to use it. You can expand the system as you need with up to 20 components, so offers a great amount of flexibility. Once installed, it’s also very easy to use with a nice clear display and touch-sensitive buttons to activate and deactivate the alarm.My main negative comments would be on the relative ease someone could disconnect the telephone cable from the control unit, unless you either go to some lengths to install it properly or opt for the additional remote keypad - which is nowhere near as nice as the control panel that comes with the kit.

This is simplicity in itself to fit and the only marginally difficult things to do is to mount the sirens (one real and one dummy) high enough on the house to keep them out of reach, but low enough to get at them to change the batteries (apparently every two years).What makes this system so good is that adding on extra sensors is very easy (and there seems to be loads available on the Warehouse Deals at the time of writing). I have added four extra door contacts, one extra PIR and one smoke detector. All went in in minutes. The door / window sensors can either be screw fixed or you can use the adhesive pads that come with them). In order to not mark things, I have also used car trim double sided sticky tape for the PIRs and that is also fine.The siren is loud (both in an outside of the house) and we haven't yet had any false alarms.When setting up, you need to decide which sensors are going to be used the whole time and which ones will not be activated when in "home" mode. What I have done is make the door / window contacts active in both modes and the PIRs are only active when the system is fully (aka Away mode). This means that I can set the perimeter of the house at night and we can move around without triggering an alarm; however when we are away, everything is set to trigger.The only other consideration for set up is that the control box needs to be near both an electrical socket (for mains supply) and a telephone socket (if you want it to 'phone you when it triggers - the system will function without a phone point if that is your choice).So, overall, the build quality is good, it is easy to fit and set up and it seems to work very well.Highly recommended.

I gave this system 4 stars because I related the product to its price, otherwise it would have been less. The kit is a fairly basic alarm, which in all honesty is what most people are looking for.These are my observations.Installation:This was reasonably straight forward, but look out for the following.Door contacts need to be thought out as the securing screw needs to be on the side where a screw driver can be used and not blocked by a wall.There are two types of screws (if this is how you secure them), two are domed and the others are flat headed. The domed are for the magnets.Make sure that the knock-outs on the back plate are opened up to their limits otherwise the flat screws can sit a little proud and stop the electronic component (top) seating flush.The most difficult element was fitting the siren and you need someone competent up a ladder to secure this.I like the use of standard batteries in the PIR and Siren and you will get plenty of warning when the button type battery in the door contacts are to be replaced.Configuring the system:This is fairly straight forward once you get familiar with the menu options. The first thing I did was to suppress the key pad beeps as this can get extremely irritating while going through the menus. I put the beeps back after I’d finished the set up.Limitations/anomalies:The first strange thing we noticed is that when setting the ‘Home’ option at night using the key fob, the panel starts beeping during the countdown. If you have children or other adults already in bed, after 30 seconds of these quite loud beeps, I suspect that most of the household will be well awake. You can suppress the beeps, but it also stops the beeps on normal exit when setting the alarm to ‘Away’. Even with the beeps suppressed you have to wait for the 30 seconds (or whatever you have set the delay for) until it is alarmed which is indicated by a little ‘chirrup’ from the panel. Oddly enough when you disarm it in the morning with the key fob, it does so immediately – no 30 second wait. Our old alarm system, set the alarm and disarmed it instantly when using the key fob.When you enter the home after setting the system to ‘Away’ the beeps start to indicate the alarm is on countdown, however the beeps are at the same tone and pitch as the key input beeps and it is difficult to know if you have keyed a numeric in or it was just the countdown beep. You can mute the beeps on entry.Security:We had an issue after our install when the 20 second delay on entry was breached and the system went into alarm. (It is very loud as you would expect). However we could not get the thing to reset, no matter how many times we entered the code. While I was able to deactivate it by disabling the entire panel, it worried me that it was so easy. In three simple steps the panel was completely nullified, though the external siren continued to sound. I’m not going to describe what I did in this review but this was a concern for me. (This issue currently with Yale Support – and still awaiting a response).Overall:Even with the concerns that I have and the limitations of the programming, it is probably still worth the money, however given my experience I think I would have gone for something a little more sophisticated. Our old alarm of 15 years had more options than this system, and I had expected the technology to have improved considerably in those years – apparently not.

l'unico dubbio che ho attualmente e' la funzionalità di chiamata di emergenza ai numeri impostati sui dispositivo,poi e' stato molto semplice la installazione di tutti i componenti, lo posso consigliare come antifurto

Five stars for this bit of kit as I sat down and read the instructions carefully and then installed the kit contents (Siren and false siren, control panel, 2 PIRs and 2 door/window switches) in about 3 hours. The instructions worked perfectly for me. If you are happy using a drill and screwdrivers and going up a ladder then that is all you need. I tested all the PIRs and switches by arming the system and walking through the PIR field of view or opening one of the doors and it all worked very well. The outside siren could be a bit louder but the inside siren (from the control panel) if VERY load when you standing next to it to disarm the system after an alarm activation but you can go into the control panel menu and switch that off, which I recommend while you are testing and then switch it back on again.One odd thing which I have not seen in any of the other reviews, so it may just have been a 'one off' with me, is that I also purchased an extra PIR, remote key pad and key fobs, and when I first used the 'Add Device' menu option it did not detect any of them (I did remove the battery protector first!). I therefore took the batteries out of all of them and left them for a while and then put the batteries back in and tried the 'Add Device' again and this time it detected all of them first time exactly as described in the manual.The dial out facility to mobile works well and the system is very configurable via the control panel menu which I also liked.All in all, easy to fit, works well and good value for money. Highly recommended.