| Location | Doddington, Lincoln |
| Property type | Mixed-use estate with retail units, a café and offices |
| Work done | Servicing, maintenance and monitoring takeover for every alarm on site |
| Systems | Pyronix and Risco control panels, monitored by Farsight |
| Time on site | Two days: one cataloguing and servicing, one testing the monitoring |
The Situation
Doddington Hall is a working estate with a number of separate premises on one site, from retail units to a café and offices. Each has its own intruder alarm, fitted at different times and by different companies over the years.
The estate’s Information and Systems Coordinator got in touch about them.
Their existing maintenance contract was coming to an end, and the company looking after the alarms was slow to reply to them. There was also no single record of what was installed where, so nobody could say with confidence what was on site.
What We Recommended, and Why
We walked the site with the coordinator, building by building, to see what we’d be taking on.
First, recommended cataloguing every alarm. You can’t look after a system properly if you do not know what is in it. The panels, the number of detection points and the age of the equipment all shape what servicing it needs and what parts an engineer should have in the van.
Then we service everything in the same visit.
We also recommended moving the remote monitoring across to us at the same time. Leaving it with the outgoing company would have split responsibility between two businesses, which makes it hard to know who to call. One contract covering servicing and monitoring keeps that clear.
Carrying Out the Work
The work took two days.
On the first day, we worked through each set of premises, servicing each alarm as we catalogued it and recording what was fitted. That record now belongs to the estate, and it also means our paperwork meets SSAIB requirements.
The second day was the monitoring transfer. We tested every alarm end to end with our monitoring centre, confirming that each signal arrived and was handled in the right way.
Testing properly means setting an alarm off for real, which needs premises that are empty at the time.
On a working estate with shops and a café open to visitors, arranging that took some coordination. We worked around trading hours and kept each test as brief as possible.
The Result
The estate now has one documented record of every alarm on site, servicing on a set schedule, and one number to call for both the maintenance and the monitoring.
Since the handover, there have been a couple of activations; one caused by a battery due for renewal, and one by a system being armed incorrectly.
Both are ordinary things that happen on a site this size. What mattered was that an engineer was available quickly on each occasion, including over a weekend.
