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Key holding could allow you to sleep easy
As they say in Game of Thrones ‘winter is coming’. For us in Yorkshire it probably won’t involve wildlings, giants and white walkers but it will bring the usual dark evenings and bad weather. With the clocks going back, it will be dark by tea time soon and the weather will become progressively colder. With darker evenings comes increased security vulnerability, with break-ins statistically increasing by around 20% at this time of year. We’ve covered a general winter security check list for businesses on the blog already but here we want to ask the question:
“Do you want to be leaving your bed on a cold winter’s night to check your alarm?”
If the answer is no then you may want to consider a key holding service.
There could be several reasons why a burglar alarm may be triggered in the night: technical fault; power cut/battery failure; an item moving or falling over inside the building; water leak; or, of course, a genuine break in. Proper maintenance will of course reduce the risk of a technical fault but nothing is infallible.
Businesses don’t actually have any legal obligation to have an alarm response mechanism so in theory you could just opt for blissful ignorance and hope for the best but it does seem to defeat the object of having an alarm to not have any kind of response plan for when it does its job.
The cheapest way of course is to attend the alarm yourself. A built in speech dialler could notify you (or a trusted staff member) of any activation by calling or texting you or you could pay for a monitoring contract, in which case the alarm receiving centre would notify you or whoever you designate to be notified. That person would then have to go out and investigate it and reset the alarm.
There are a few issues with this ranging from the inconvenience of having to drag yourself out of bed in the night to potentially having to confront an intruder. Don’t fancy that? Key holding might be a better alternative.
With a key holding service you wouldn’t be notified or need to attend site. This would be done for you by an SIA approved contractor. As well as investigating the cause of the alarm trigger, they would also usually be able to deal with the situation, as required, such as resetting the alarm, changing the lock, boarding up windows or calling the emergency services. You can choose whether you want to be notified about this at the time or wait until the next morning.
You are also guaranteed a timely response with a key holding service. Whereas you or a member of staff may not be able to respond straight away for various reasons, a response service will be on site very quickly and they will also be able to deal with the situation quickly because of the skills they have or the services they are able to call in. This could be really important to protect your building from any further risk if unsecured or if there was an urgent problem such as a water or gas leak.
If you value your full night’s sleep and would like to talk to us about key holding simply call us on 0345 8335543.