Our Guardian Appt

I offered to let my husband to write this post and he flat out refused.  No excuse given other than "No".  I guess when he asked about writing a blog he meant me, solely by myself.  That means I can be as biased as I want to be.  From here on out I will be the heroine and he will be the  tortured soul, let's say a Jekyll and Hyde type character.

Our next appointment was our Guardian appointment.  This company originally started off as an alarm company but now handles the technology installs for most major builders.  Now I read quite a few blogs that report that the Guardian appointment was horrendous, unnecessary, up sale central, blah blah blah.  So we were approaching this meeting with our guards up.

My husband set up the appointment and then emailed me the confirmation.  I had no idea that the meeting was going to be at the model home (about 30 minutes away from where we live now) and not at the home office (40 minutes away in the OPPOSITE direction of the model) and he let me drive.  He questioned the idea of going to the home office, but again my email made no mention of meeting at the model home, just gave the company address.  Now let's add to the drama of a rainy day and a tire that decided to lose air pressure.   Little tidbit about me- I once had a blowout and so I am terrified of low air pressure in my tires.

We made it to our appointment  about 1 hour late.  Our rep was nice enough to wait for us.  Score one for the new home owners.   From the onset our Guardian rep said he wasn't going to try to up sale us.  Hmph, I've heard that one before.  Ryan offers a standard 4 service outlets (telephone, internet, cable) in any combination that you choose.  Now we haven't had a home phone since 2007 and really didn't find it necessary to add one to our new home.

We ended up adding data links to two bedrooms, doing a hard wire internet connection in the finished basement, 2 prewires for the flat screens and upgrading all our cables to cat 6.  The bedrooms will get wireless extender to help make the WiFi in our home seamless.  Mind you this was dialogue between my husband and the sales rep.

We currently have an alarm system that we never use- mostly because the city wanted us to pay a permit to use the darn thing- something that the alarm company never disclosed to us.  Needless to say we was a little gun shy when the sales rep broached the subject about an alarm system.
"Nope we don't need it"  I immediately said.   I explained that I knew the system was free but there was a $250 fee to start it and that monthly fee would be anywhere between $30- 50.  We would just go wireless thank very much.   He said actually- there would be no fee because we spent over $500 in other equipment and we would get 2 extra motion sensors for free.  Because we declined to add a phone jack, our device would be cellular allowing us to lock our,home remotely and set up pass codes for the kids so we know who got home when and whole lot of other features that was pretty cool.  And it would all be hardwired behind the wall.  Do we have to pay the township a permit fee?  No. What is our monthly cost?  $35 flat.  Anything else?  An extra motion sensor would cost another $80 and you have 5 days to tell us to go to hell.  Sweet.

We added the alarm system.

What did we skip? - A sound system for the house and the built in Dirt Devil (waste of time in my opinion) not to mention the security cameras..  While it would have been nice to have an intercom system we decided it would be nice to burn a few calories and actually get up to go talk to the person.

All in all we came out relatively still in tact and spent about a grand total of $1245.   Unfortunately this could not  be included in that awesome sale.