Hay guys, recently bought a Monitor Plus for a house I plan on flipping with my brother in law. Decided that I didn't want to have to any long term contracts like you get with the major alarm companies but we definitely needed the added security of a monitored system for those not familiar the Monitor Plus is made by x10 and the monitoring is by Orka an x10 subsidiary I believe, at twenty dollars a month I consider it a little pricey but there are no contracts and you're only charged for the time you use like if you take a 3 week vacation every year you could retire your Protector Plus and setup your Monitor Plus for those three weeks and you would only be charged for that month 20 bucks! I think the least amount of time you can sign up for is a month.
Well for folks like me it's a good deal especially if you have spare x10 hardware laying around. Well anyway I plugged it up and was in the process of testing it out, this was the third week of testing just wanted to make sure this thing was going to function flawlessly before I entrusted it to a piece of property worth well..... quite a bit. I've been using the stuff off an on for years and if you got good equipment then it's very trustworthy. I did have a Protector Plus that I purchased once as a backup a while back and after about 6 moths it was just plugged into a wall socket and I actually forgot about it. I came home and heard this popping and gurgling and couldn't figure what the heck it was until I realized it was coming from our guest bedroom and yep it was the console, so ever since that I've just haven't had the same trust in these units. I also remember having to return my main unit Protector Plus console several times before I got a functioning unit the other two had defective voice chips noting that would have keep it from basically functioning but it was still a manufacturing defect that should of been caught before leaving the factory.
Well anyway I accidentally set off the system and realized that the all lights on all lights off signal from the console was not functioning properly it was like it was out of sequence and disjointed, well I immediately blamed the hardware you know that cheap Chinese.... well you get the idea. Just couldn't figure it out hum..... noise on the line was a thought, hardware just couldn't figuer out what was going on then I had the presence of mind to remember that everything was working fine until I plugged the Monitor Plus in. Then I said could it be interfering with the signal
? Nah how could it affect the signal well I'll just unplug it to eliminate even the possibility anyway and walla!!! problem solved as soon as I unplugged the Monitor Plus all was well again and the All Lights On Off worked perfectly so I just wanted everyone to be aware of what I discovered that having multiple consoles hooked up at the same time can definitely cause conflict between the systems, how or why I don't have a clue but you will encounter problems if you have multiple systems connected on the same line, and by the way this didn't happen all the time but it happen enough that it should be a concern especially if someone broke in and the system didn't preform properety. Hope this helps had me pulling my hair out for months until I figured it out. Best of luck!
tj