Our insurance company requires (fire and burglar) monitoring on homes over a certain dollar amount, You might want to check into that.

If you have the fire alarm included and the system is monitored, the fire department will be called.

If it is not monitored, depending on the size of your home, it may alert you faster to a fire than if it wasn't included.

My son does home automation for a living. He said you should go on cocoontech.com in the security forums and ask your question there. They are very helpful we used them often when we were building! Happy building!

Code in our area has smoke detectors in lots of areas, and our electrician hardwired them. Then the security folks will have one hooked into the security system that will notify fire dept. We're also installing a CO detector.

Talk with a Security Installation Company about your house plan and what they suggest for a system. We chose Motion detectors over glass breaks, and also put door contacts on all exterior doors.

Trudy

I have some experience with this - from my first house where I paid ADT to install the security system and my new house where I installed the security system myself.

If you pay a company like ADT to do the security system - they will typically want to sell you additional separate smoke detectors that are connected to and monitored by the security system. These detectors are seperate and not connected to the smoke detectors that you need per your building code. Way back in 1993 when we had our first house built - the building code only required 1 smoke detector per floor. So we added 1 additional smoke detector on the second floor, and only that detector was monitored by the security system. The other 3 house detectors per code that were not monitored by the security system. I questioned why the security company did not use the house detectors I already had and was told they could not. It turns out they could have BUT the alarm companies make a lot more money selling you additional sensors.

Fast forward to 2007 and my new home. I got so frustrated paying ADT to service my system ($400 for a new key pad!!) that I decided to do the security system myself. This time the building code required us to have 10 smoke detectors for the house - yikes! So there was no way I was going to have 10 of those plus another few for the alarm system.

It turns out that if you find the right alarm company - there is a little interface board that can montior the signal used my your home smoke detectors to alert each other when there is an alarm. Ever wonder why or how all you house smoke detectors go off when one (like the kitchen) detector goes off? Code requires house smoke detectors be hard wired in a chain - and that is done using 3 conductor wire - either 14/3 or 12/3. Two of the wires are for 120 volt power but the third wire (the red one) is used to carry a low voltage signal that allows all of the detectots to know when any one of them is outputting an alarm condition. If you tap into that signal your security system can monitor you home smoke detectors - with no additional smoke detectors needed.

Now here's the catch. I was told (but I never verified this) that you can't pass the building inspection if you have a low voltage wire that is tied to your house smoke detectors and running to your security system. So I added that feature immediately after I moved in.

So you can either have two sets of smoke detectors (one just for the house and one set for the security system) or find a security system company that will tie in your home smoke detectors to your security system after you move in.

The circuit board to provide this interface is tiny and very inexpensive (maybe 20 dollars in parts & labor to make one). This intreface board is the size of 4 postage stamps and it goes into your security system box. You run a pair of wires to the very first house smoke detector in the chain (usually in the basement). One lead get's tied to the red wire, one to neutral (white) - this is the way the alarm system will sense the 9 volt signal on the line. Another pair of wires from the little interface board goes into you security system as a monitored alarm zone. Most alarm contollers have a special zone set up just for fire alarms.

Whenever any house smoke detector goes off, a 9 volt signal is sent down the red wire from that smoke detector to trigger all other detectors to sound off. The security system interface board will sense this voltage (key here - without reducing the load on that red line) and send an alarm to the security minitoring company.

Hope that helps.

sniffdog -- are you saying that ADT won't let you tie in? Obviously in theory it's possible--you just need the proper relay/interface.

But I wonder whether ADT does it for liability reasons. Say you sign up for fire monitoring, but your own smoke detectors aren't working properly. Then you have a fire and blame ADT, but they had no way to make sure your devices were functioning.