Our monitoring & servicing charge was set by Masco several years ago. //.National Installer.// will continue to charge us the agreed £150 a year until we change the control panel. Then we have to switch to a new maintenance contract at £250 for the same service. I cannot see any logic in this, other than to make more money out of us.

The salemans logic as to why we have to loose a zone is that we have 5 pir's and two door sensor's. For alarm confirmation they would need to put an additional sensor in the garage and apparently they have to keep one zone free. That means we need 9 zones, but their controller only does 8. Hence we need to loose a zone. Now I've checked out the Galaxy documentation I see it can do more than 8 zones and hence the salesman is just trying to sell a standard package.

I totally agree about being ill-informed. Hence asking the questions here so I'll know whether I'm being ill-informed when I approach a local installer.

There is no reason for them to keep a zone free, unless they are going to be installing a Push To Set button, a Shunt Lock or some other means of Final Setting.

I would think that they would be fitting a final setting device as //.National Installer.// will be monitoring the alarm. You could always ask the sales guy about final door setting, which means that when the door shuts on the way out, the system sets. This would overcome the problem of losing a zone.

Andy