Tonight we had a false fire alarm, something we were cooking was smoking up. FOr some reason the Ring telephone call went straight to voicemail on my phone, my wife’s phone was dead. She went to the keypad and (we thought) disabled the alarm. A few minutes go by and there are firemen at our door. I called RIng and was told this only silences the alarm. It doesn’t make much sense to me that on a door sensor trip the keypad can disable an alarm and prevent police being dispatched, but the same can’t be done for fire alarms.
A feature to diasable the fire dispatch through the kepad would be great.
Sorry to hear about this experience @johnwt88! It sounds like the responders may have been dispatched after the failed contacts, leaving little time to reverse this. If you are only using 2 contacts, I recommend including a 3rd if possible. As we are always working to improve our neighbors’ experience and you’ve shared an excellent use case, I’ll be sure to deliver this feedback to the appropriate team.
In the meantime, feel free to check out our help center article for tips on preventing false Alarms.
Wasn’t clear from your response. If you have a false fire alarm is there a way to “disarm” it before people are dispatched? Can you do it from the app?
Or do you have to answer the phone call from Ring to do it?
There are only certain dispatch instances that can be cancelled. For this specific instance, a fire alarm dispatch is usually unable to be cancelled. A burglary alarm, however, can be cancelled by disarming as soon as possible.
Check out this help center article which breaks down how each Alarm event is handled for dispatch. You’ll see a special note under each description which will indicate if it can be cancelled or not.
For a normal alarm, my Ring app shows the alarm (siren) going off if it is tripped. If I disarm the alarm (siren) within 30 seconds I will not get a phone call from monitoring and no police will be dispatched.
Does the fire alarm work the same way? Does the app allow we to cancel the alarm BEFORE a dispatch has happened.
I have a similar question about the fire alarm call center procedure. This link says that Ring will only call the FIRST emergency contact, and if no one is reached, will dispatch the fire department:
Smoke/Fire Alarm (triggered by Smoke & CO Listener or First Alert Smoke/CO Alarm)
Your first emergency contact is called first before the emergency responders are dispatched. If the first contact does not answer/requests dispatch, then a dispatch request will be made. The remaining contacts on your list are called, and if anyone can be reached, they are notified of the emergency and may be given the opportunity to try to cancel if it’s a false alarm. If no one can be reached, the monitoring center may leave automated voicemails.
_Please Note: It’s usually not possible to cancel fire department dispatch after it has been requested. __Disarming the alarm will not stop the Monitoring Center from requesting dispatch. _
–> So if I am the first contact and happen to not reachable, and my wife’s cooking sets off the smoke alarm, it sounds like there is no way to prevent an automatic dispatch. She is the second contact, but the trucks have already been dispatched and maybe not cancelable. Is this correct? If so, this is not so good… any other ideas to get two (or three) contact calls BEFORE calling the fire department?
Hey @Kerndog91, the way that you described it is exactly how it will happen in the event of the Smoke alarm. If your wife is a more reachable person or home most of the time, it may be best to make her your first contact to help avoid any false alarms, as she will already be home and should know if it’s a false alarm or not. This is the way our central monitoring station does the dispatching in order to help cut down time between when the event happens and when help gets to you. This process cannot be changed as case by case, so I recommend making your wife the first emergency contact and making yourself the second.
Thanks, and yes, this is the conclusion that we decided upon. I think it will work for us. Only other idea would be to make our landline the first number to call… but the landline is what we’re going to get rid of.
Is there a way to disable the listener and have it only enabled when In away mode?
Don’t need a false alarm if someone at home burns a meal and I’m at work. The interconnected audible alert is enough to get anyones attention at home.
More concerned about the house burning down when no one is home.
Having come from a 20+ year old hardwired DSC System, I know from experience that if my smokes went off - I had a period of time to “acknowledge” the event, before the monitoring center was ever notified of the alarm.
It’s absolutely silly that there isn’t a similiar hold-down timer available for when a smoke event is detected before the fire department is notified.
So, my first instinct is to acknowledge the event at the panel. But then I also need to make sure and grab my phone to ensure I’m able to answer the phone when it rings. I have only (1) shot of making sure I don’t have the fire department arriving, as a result of some extra crispy bacon.
How do we get this fixed? Or atleast make it an option, to add some delay given then the state of the panel (armed, or unarmed)?
Hey @Gabester and @bwolfman. Thank you for your feedback here, I will make sure to pass this onto the appropriate teams for you both. At this time, the listener (or Smoke/CO Alarm combo that you may have) is always in a state of listening to detect and then sound the alarm if it sense Smoke/CO via the Listener or the actual detector itself. This will be present in both Disarm, Home, and Away. I understand that our response time may seem a bit fast paced in the event of this happening especially when you are Disarmed or in Home mode, but this is the way our Monitoring services work at this time.
For smoke alarms, you will have 30 seconds from when the alarm is going off to Disarm the system and clear this alarm, but if you do not Disarm and clear this in 30 seconds, you will get a call from our Monitoring service, and if the first call does not answer for a smoke alarm, the Fire Department will be sent out.
Hey @Gabester and @bwolfman. Thank you for your feedback here, I will make sure to pass this onto the appropriate teams for you both. At this time, the listener (or Smoke/CO Alarm combo that you may have) is always in a state of listening to detect and then sound the alarm if it sense Smoke/CO via the Listener or the actual detector itself. This will be present in both Disarm, Home, and Away. I understand that our response time may seem a bit fast paced in the event of this happening especially when you are Disarmed or in Home mode, but this is the way our Monitoring services work at this time.
For smoke alarms, you will have 30 seconds from when the alarm is going off to Disarm the system and clear this alarm, but if you do not Disarm and clear this in 30 seconds, you will get a call from our Monitoring service, and if the first call does not answer for a smoke alarm, the Fire Department will be sent out.
That works. On the amazon reviews users were complaning that you couldn’t cancel fire from the panel. Maybe that was an old Ring behavior. Thanks for the clarification!
So according to the support page disarming the alarm will not prevent the Monitoring Center from calling the fire department. This is crazy. If our first emergency contact isn’t home and I burn a pizza, I have no way to stop the fire department from being called. Is there no way to “pause” smoke monitoring while I cook?
Hi there, neighbors! Thank you for this feedback. It’s been some time since we’ve provided clarification on this question, and since have fine tuned our Alarm functionality and support documentation.
Thank you, @Nak for sharing this. This help center article is correct, as well as this help center article describing how the Fire Department is immediately dispatched.
While you can disarm the Alarm, answer the Professional Monitoring call to request cancellation of dispatch, and the Monitoring team might be able to attempt that cancelation, the immediately dispatched Fire Department would likely already be on the way. Thus, we do not promise or advertise the ability to cancel a fire related emergency, as these are intended for immediate dispatch response (when professionally monitored).
