Every month you pay for equipment that isn't yours.

With a subscription system, usually not. Those detectors belong to the provider, run on a closed protocol and have to go back when you cancel — there's nothing to take over. To be sure, check your contract to see whether the equipment was bought or leased; if it says you have to return it, you know enough.

If you also still have an older wired installation in the wall, from an installer years ago, that's a different story. That wiring is usually yours and you can often simply reuse it with a new control panel.

Work it out with your own amount. If you pay forty euros a month, that's 480 euros a year and 2,400 euros over five years. Here you buy a complete system once, and after that you only pay for a prepaid SIM card at around ten euros a year if you want alerts via 4G. So you usually earn back the difference within the first year — and everything after that is profit. What's more, at the end you still have a working system instead of a string of monthly payments.

That's the honest part of this story: you do lose it, and you should take that into account. It's worth knowing what a monitoring centre actually does, though. When an alarm comes in, they call to verify whether it's a false alarm, and only then might someone go and check or the police be alerted. That takes time, and in most cases you're the one on the phone.

What you get in return: the siren still goes off, you get the alert on your phone immediately, and you can call straight away yourself instead of going through a middleman. If you really want a response service, this isn't the right choice — that comes with a subscription, and that's exactly what we don't do.