What is a Fire Alarm Monitoring Centre

Fire alarms play an essential role in protecting your staff and commercial premises from the threat of fire. If an alarm is triggered during the working day, it’s the sign to make sure you get your team to safety, call the fire and rescue service and even try to tackle the fire yourself if you have the right fire extinguishers to hand and know how to use them.

But what if the alarm goes off at the weekend or at night, when there’s no one on site to respond? Your staff should be safe, but what about the building and the valuable assets it contains? Will the fire and rescue service even attend the scene if there’s no one around to hear the alarm and alert them? Or what if anyone who does hear it just assumes someone else will deal with it or dismisses it as a false alarm?

That’s where fire alarm monitoring comes in.

What is fire alarm monitoring?

Fire alarm monitoring is a 24/7 service that ensures there’s always someone available to deal with a fire alarm at your premises. When your fire alarm is triggered, an operative at our receiving centre will be alerted and be able to immediately assess the situation and check that it is a genuine emergency and not the result of a fault. 

Once they are satisfied that expert help is needed, they’ll notify the fire and rescue service and any keyholders to ensure a far more rapid response than would have been the case if the alarm had just been allowed to sound without someone being around to do something about it.

The benefits of fire alarm monitoring

• Your premises and assets are always protected

Even when there’s no one at your premises, such as at weekends and at night, you’ll have the confidence of knowing that an experienced fire safety expert is watching out for you every hour of the day, every day of the week and every week of the year.

• Guaranteed response at any time

We’ve probably all heard fire, burglar and car alarms sound and done nothing about it – assuming that someone else will be dealing with it or that it’s a false alarm. Meanwhile, your local fire and rescue service probably has more than enough to cope with without being called out to alarms that may not even be genuine emergencies. With a monitoring service, both those risks are removed in one go.

• Better protection for your business

Because our monitoring service will pick up on an alarm quickly, we’ll be able to ensure that the fire brigade is able to attend far more quickly than would otherwise be the case. That will vastly improve the chances of any damage to your site, stock and equipment being kept to a minimum.

• Elimination of false alarms

If you’re a keyholder for your business, chances are you’ve been called out in the middle of the night to turn off the fire alarm after it’s gone off with no obvious reason. A fire alarm monitoring service doesn’t just protect your premises, it also protects your sleep, because we’ll be able to identify when it’s a false alarm without having to disturb the fire brigade or drag you out of bed.

• Cheaper than employing your own out-of-hours workers

The only other way to ensure such round-the-clock watchfulness is to pay someone to be there at all hours. A fire alarm monitoring service is a far more cost-effective solution.

Is fire alarm monitoring a legal requirement?

No, fire alarm monitoring is not a legal requirement – although having a fire alarm is for the vast majority of UK businesses, as spelt out in the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. That doesn’t mean that monitoring your alarm isn’t a good idea, highly recommended or even necessary in many cases.  

Want to know more?

If you would like your business to enjoy the type of 24-hour protection afforded by a fire alarm monitoring service, all you have to do is get in touch with the fire safety professionals at Scutum North. We can offer one of the most up-to-date monitoring services available in the UK and support clients across the north of England, including in and around Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester.

Get in touch with us now to find out more or get a free, no-obligation quotation.