As per SAIDSA (South African Intruder Detection Services Association), who Trojan Security is certified by, homeowners/tenants and businesses must test their signals once a month to make sure they are received at our control room.
There are many reasons why a signal might not come through which can be:
- a faulty radio transmitter
- a faulty battery
- a faulty alarm system
- a critically low battery that does not have enough power available for the radio transmitter to transmit a signal
By neglecting to do this regularly can put you, your family or your employee’s safety at risk as well as successfully getting away with your possessions. If your alarm system has activated and nobody contacts you from the control room, that usually means that a signal has not been received and you will need to contact us to get a technician out to diagnose what issue there is on the alarm system/electric fence/gate alarm that is prohibiting the signal from being sent. With the constant load shedding currently being experienced any manner of things can stop working thus something that was working yesterday might not be working today.
In the past, the only way you could test this is by calling the control room on 011 792 0738 option 1 and doing a manual test over the phone and they would confirm if the signal has been received but with technological advancements, you can now do this check without speaking to a controller in your own time when suitable. Trojan Security has an account called TrojanSecurity_Bot in Telegram that has a /Test feature that specifically checks if your signal is reaching the control room. Once you have downloaded the app and found our account you will share your contact details with us which will send a message to the control room and Operations will open the functionality so that you can use the app. Thereafter at any point in time you can type in the command /Test or press the Test button which the bot will respond with “System on Test for 15 mins” which means the system is no longer live and in test mode. You can now go ahead and press a panic or arm your alarm system and activate a zone(s) on your alarm system, set off the electric fence or leave your gate open for longer than a minute if you have a Sherlo Gate Alarm installed and the app will send a notification back stipulating what signal has been received in real time which is your confirmation the signals are being received. Once the 15 mins for the test period has elapsed, you will get another message “System back in Service” and any activation thereafter would be treated as live and the control room would call and dispatch a vehicle to respond. Even if you would prefer to not use the app, it remains your responsibility to test the signals once a month, even if that means you call in and do that manually with a controller. The control room is exceptionally busy during load shedding and thus far we have not had a single day in 2023 without load shedding thus our request would be to use the app to lighten the burden on the controllers so that they are available for emergencies.
You will also get an additional silent /Panic that can be used in our account on Telegram that can be used at the property or away from it but if we receive a Telegram Panic, the reaction officer will always respond directly to the property and not the GPS co-ordinates of your mobile. Just a reminder, that Panic signals get 1st priority over other signals which means the controller will dispatch the vehicle immediately and then only call the contacts listed on the profile in an attempt to gather further information as to what might be taking place but by the time they speak with anyone, the vehicle would already be on route which is to save time and to get there as fast as possible.
Lastly, you will get push notifications on the app for all the signals we receive from the radio transmitter thus you will see everything we see which will be arming/disarming, alarm activations, panics, electric fence activations (if linked for monitoring), gate alarm activations (if a Sherlo Gate Alarm is installed), mains failures when the power goes out and low battery alerts which will keep you in the loop as to what is happening on the alarm if you are there or away from the property. Unfortunately, you cannot control the alarm via this app but if you are looking for that functionality, we can quote on installing Olarm or an IP Module made by the manufacturer of your alarm system.
The 1st user at the property can download and use our account on Telegram for FREE but if further users are required, there will be an additional cost of R67,46 incl. vat per month per user. If you want to change users, you can let Operations know that the current user should be deleted and then you can proceed to download and install it on the new phone.
View the Telegram Configuration Instructions
