Guardian

Right after our meeting with NVR we met with Guardian. Guy was very nice and walked us through their services. Home security is their bread and butter, or Life Safety as they like to call it. Sounded like a nice system. Talked us into the extra fire protection. Then dropped the $45 a month for 60 months bomb on us. Bleck. He did mention that if we moved during that time, they'd install a new system for free in the new house - guess that's an okay deal.

Went into home automation, all the data ports, surround sound etc. Poor guy didn't know what he was getting into with my husband and I being tech savvy and already having a pretty good idea of what we wanted and how we wanted it to work. Data ports were fine. We pretty much put one in every room and did the mounted TV stuff above the fireplace and in the Master bedroom. We added some sort of wireless thing in the upstairs hallway (I must have zoned out during this conversation, but apparently I said we agreed we should do it and it was supposed to be an extra $200 or so).

Added the surround sound, which was like an extra $2,300 but weren't positive where we wanted to put it in the basement - not sure how we're placing furniture yet. Did not go with the home automation as you have them install the equipment into your Life Safety system to control from the app (which didn't look too bad) and bumped the cost up anther $5 a month. Didn't do the whole home audio, didn't even price it out as we required it could handle streaming Google Music from our phones and it could not. Not worth it when there are so many wireless systems out there these days I think.

TIP: Get an itemized list of everything you added and what it costs before you sign, after you sign, and before you finalize with Ryan.

We ended up with a lot of questions and the Guardian guy was very responsive as we had three days to cancel. I never felt comfortable with the $45 a month contract. We wanted to do some cool home automation stuff ourselves with Smartthings and discovered it would not integrate with their system, so we decided to go with that exclusively and drop the Life Safety from Guardian. We considered letting them install the system and canceling the contract later and just using it as a passive system. The guy had originally told us, if we did that, we'd only have to pay the $200-ish install cost and like 10-20% of our remaining contract. I could stomach that, but when I asked for that in writing, all they could come up with was we'd have to pay the entire install cost $1000+ and 20% of our contract. Not taking that risk.

We ended up also canceling the surround sound. Found a sweet Sony sound bar at Best Buy and I'd feel better about something like that than the full loudness of a regular system in a townhome. I want to be a good neighbor.

So we ended up just doing the data and cable wiring and that stupid wireless thing that ended up costing over double what he quoted, but we only realized after we signed all the paperwork since that's when we finally received an itemized list. (See tip above).

We ordered our Smartthings hub (on backorder) and a sensor to start playing with it. Plus, the hubby wanted an Amazon Echo so until we get the other stuff hooked up, Alexa is just playing music and reading us the news until she can turn the lights on and off.