Guardian Protection Services

I contacted some people locally and they recommended Guardian Protection Services. Guardian's reps have been the best of any organization that I’ve dealt with. They were conscientious and they have a balance of understanding, process, and procedure. When I talked to them, they asked the right questions. Any problem I’ve had, they’ve been responsive and flexible.

Guardian Protection installed everything and everything was fine. But there was a problem with the covering outside. So they had to come and open that up. The disconnect was if the system was down, it was down. My dilemma was more of the terminology of when I say down. Part of it would be them asking me questions, such as what I meant by down. What I meant was I didn’t want it to protect anything, I just wanted it to turn off. And they would walk me through the whole thing - go to the box, plug in, do this, do that, and test things to make sure they work.

Another nice thing was, I was not gonna remember what they told me to do, but I could talk to them. I could call them and say that I have no idea how to turn my thing on. They would say that they don't have an issue where other people would say they already came here and taught me. The beauty of it is they don’t take for granted that I’m really not listening. I’m just listening enough to get through that part of it, and at the end, I’m really not paying attention. They pretend like nothing’s wrong and just keep giving advice and helping me. Their customer service is pretty spot on and it's perfect.

We wanted a surround sound in three rooms and we wanted the security system to have one glass break sensor and sensors on all the exterior doors. We also asked for the video doorbell, cameras outside, and a keypad. We wanted it to be set up like the model home in the other neighborhood, which had a keypad in the master bedroom and had a keypad downstairs by the front door. We also wanted the motion sensors. My sister is handicapped, so we asked him about the medical bracelet as well.

We went through everything, line by line, and he told us how much it would cost. It came up to around $6,200 and I had my own bank and my own account. I wasn’t financing through Ryan Homes, but, apparently, Ryan Homes had a deal where they are only allowed a fee of $1,500 of the cost into the mortgage, and I was trying to get the whole pay. I thought the whole pay was where they put the mortgage, but the rep said no. They could only submit a certain amount for the pre-wire.

I said that it didn't make any sense and if I was gonna pre-wire three rooms and it was gonna cost $1,500 per room or $1,200 per room, then how could he only submit $1,500? It was not all in one room. It was separate rooms and security on top of that. So, what he did was he submitted a change order for around $3,900 and $495 of that was for Ryan Homes' electrician to put in the three electrical outlets for a flat panel TV installed. And because Guardian doesn’t do the electrical part, they issued my wires and they wired all the speaker wires and pre-wired all the other stuff.

I called the salesman back and said that I was getting down to the nitty-gritty of my money. He never emailed me the contract. He had my both my email and my wife's and he was supposed to email the entire contract us, as well as the part he sent off to the mortgage company. Over the four-month period, every time I requested the contract, he kept on sending me the same thing - the change order that was the $3,900. I said that was not what I was asking for. I wanted the list of everything that we purchased - the entire purchase price and what we were getting for that - but he lost it. I searched my email and my wife searched hers and spam, but we never got anything from him. We gave him the email date and he went back and searched his email, but he kept sending me the same documents that he sent to Ryan Homes or NVR Mortgage.

I told him I needed to know exactly how much I owe them after closing, when they come to finish the work, but instead of giving me the contract that we wrote up, he just did a lot of crap in the body of an email, sent it to me, and tried to charge me an additional $2,000. He started telling me that I owed him $4,000 when I knew it was gonna be closer around $2,400. I told him he needed to recheck his figures because he told me that everything was inclusive and the only things that my wife and I were gonna ask to buy were the receivers for the surround sound.

He ignored me for about 15 days, so I called their customer service to talk to them. The rep was trying to say, “I see this and this, but I don’t see that. I don’t know, would you look again because I don’t have a copy of anything. He never sent me a copy.” He reached out to the salesman and told him to send me a copy of the bill, but the salesman sent me the same thing again. I said that it was not what I was looking for. The manager got involved and I told him that I would not have bought all the stuff knowing that there was gonna be an additional $2,000 charge when I already had to buy a $1,000 worth of receivers. He said that he would just take 30% off the bill, which brought it back down to about $2,500. I said that was fine and that was what I was willing to pay, although he was not doing me a favor. His sales rep screwed up from day one and I told him not to make it look like he was appeasing me because I was asking for something that I didn’t get.

In the end, when they came out and did the pre-wire, they mounted the control, but they mounted the Guardian pad by the garage door. When people knock, they don’t go in my garage and knock on the garage entry door, they knock on the front door. If my alarm system is on and somebody knocks on my front door, I don’t have to run over to the garage and turn the alarm off, then go back to the front door to answer the front door, so I asked them to move it. They also did not put the one in our bedroom, so I asked them to install that. They started giving me a bunch of hooplas and I told them to just leave the thing where it is and to just give me an extra one. They charged me $175 for it and they wouldn’t give it to me for free. They also charged me the additional $177 to install it.

They also didn’t pre-wire the sensor on the exterior garage door, so I have a walk-through door that goes out into my backyard and I have another door in the garage that goes into the house. I told the salesman that we have four exterior doors now, so he put four sensors, but they didn’t pre-wire yet I got charged for pre-wire. And then when they put the doorbell on, it was supposed to be a video doorbell, so if somebody rings the doorbell and I'm away, I could have a conversation with him and I can unlock and lock the door remotely. However, they just put a regular doorbell out there which didn’t work. They had to replace it with a doorbell that worked, but I said that it was still not what we asked for. I had to fight the guy to put the right doorbell in.

They finally got that all straight. Then about two weeks after that, we were sitting there in the cat path off of the glass break sensor and they didn’t have it screwed all the way to the wall so the cat went walking on it and when we tried to put it back on there, all it did was set the alarm off. So, I had to have them kill that part of the alarm system so it would quit sending messages, and then it took them two weeks to come out just to fix that. In addition to that, when they were putting the speakers in, the pre-wires were up in there and the guy drew on the ceiling with a Sharpie for he was gonna cut the sheet rack out to mount the sheet, but he drew it on the wrong side. When he fixed it, he put the speaker up and I got three quarters of a circle drawn on my ceiling with a black Sharpie.

As far as the customer service billing side, I called them and said that I haven’t gotten a bill yet and that I was a little concerned. I was starting to get paper bills and it kept saying that I didn’t have any balance, then it said I had a $175 balance for the extra keypad, which I didn’t pay purposely because I was waiting to see how much they were gonna bill me the total for everything else. It should have been $2,541 and it was what I agreed to. They wound up charging me 2,800. They charged me $300 more than what I was supposed to pay because of the keypad and that wasn’t even my fault.

The rep said that he had to do some research. It took him over a week and he called me back and broke out the whole bill for the $2,800. He told me that what happened was the first month was pro-rated per day and they didn't charge me $60 - $75. It was good for the 27th of October, but they put it everything else together and put it on that bill.

The salesman could’ve submitted the entire thing to my mortgage company and had it all put into the mortgage, but he refused to do that. After they sent the change order, I couldn’t send another one, so I wound up paying $2,800 out of my pocket. My mortgage company was gonna pay the whole thing, but they checked Ryan Homes and said we were asked for our preconstruction meeting that we couldn’t add or change anything else from that point.

But the guy that did the pre-wire and the guys that came back and added the speakers were very professional and courteous. They worked hard and worked close to a full day. They did a good job. They were very respectful with my home and they did a couple of little blemishes that had been taken care of. They were very diligent and were fantastic. However, on the customer service side, they were a bit confused, and on the sales side, they screwed the whole thing up and they tried to push it back on me.

Their manager came out, thought of ways to make the cost the lowest possible for us. We knew some purchase blenders, and he went with the purchase blender discount. He gave us the lowest price that he could and they really worked with us and my family. Their technicians were very nice and they did a good job. The only thing that happened was we had to move the one sensor over a little bit so they had to come back out because it stopped reading there after a week. It wasn’t a big deal and everybody was very good. They called me several times about setting up the date. They also had a lot of options and I didn’t have trouble picking a time and day. They also always call right away every time the system goes off.

The overall quality of the equipment and its performance is very good. Since they came for the sensor replace, there are no troubles with it going off on the stairway. The alarm would go off and notify us if anything were to happen to our house so I feel very comfortable and sleep well. I feel very secure having Guardian and I would definitely recommend them.

The fellow that installed the wiring was very, very good. He trained me and my daughter on the security system. He was very knowledgeable and helpful. He helped us with our internet access and getting our applications captured on our cell phone, and he showed us how to use everything. My daughter is able to access the security system and cameras from our phone. She's also able to know when people turn on and off the security system. The security system gives her peace of mind. If there is any activity or concern, we can give access to the video footage. The important thing is for my daughter to be able to unlock or turn off the alarm remotely if she needs to. We’ve been able to train our kids and grand-kids how to get in the front door with the code and how to go and disarm the alarm if necessary.

I tried to call Guardian a few times because the system didn't work and they were pretty good. They set up appointments for us and they were pretty reasonable. They're pretty good to work with. The alarm feature went off twice and the rep called right away and he was very professional. Those two times happened during our training period. It was a week where, if they had to send the police off by mistake, we wouldn't be charged. But we were in both cases, able to resolve it before anybody was dispatched. But Guardian was very timely.

I have to call Guardian because the first bill that came in didn't seem right to me. I gotta call the customer service accounting department to find out what some of the charges were, because I remember paying all that money upfront in the original purchase price of the house, which included the installation, and they charge me a $85 installation fee, which was never part of the original package as it was presented to me by the marketing person. But overall, I recommend them.

When I moved the second time, they rolled it into my monthly payment and my monthly payment stayed the same from the first time I got the service to when I moved. They rolled the equipment in again and now, we could never get our money back, so we needed them to pay. The person that I talked to when it was gonna be transferred over never made it clear to me that they needed the $900 upfront to pay for the equipment. If he had said that, I would have not agreed to continue the service.

I said that I needed to make sure that when we transfer it over, my payment is gonna be the same and that I’m not gonna be charged extra for the equipment. He said that my payment’s gonna stay the same and that’s the way I understood it. So far, I’ve been through two people and one said that he will have to get back to me. Somebody got back to me in two days and said that they were gonna have to look and see and if they can take the equipment out. They usually don’t do that so they were gonna have to get back to me. I have good credit and I don’t want it to be ruined. I need to get formality on this. Halfway through, I’m not impressed with the customer service rep. The original person that helped me with the transfer was not clear to me. I bought a timeshare eight years ago and I was just making an example, but I felt misled by the last representative that aided me in the transfer.

The installer was friendly and very accommodating to where I wanted things put and he seemed to know what he was doing. The system is all-inclusive. I wanted a sensor on each window, a sensor on the door, a smoke carbon dioxide, and glass break motion detector. I wanted a complete system. I also like the app. If someone’s outside or if my landlord needs to get in or if I forgot to arm it, I can do it from my phone. The system is good, but as far as the situation I’m in now, I would never recommend Guardian Protection Services to anybody.

This experience destroys everything that has happened in the past and now I’m dealing with this $1,000 bill. If they’re not gonna admit that they misled me or that there was an error and they won’t work with me on rolling it into my payment, then I’m gonna have to figure out how to get out of it because it’s not on my budget. My budget is $58 a month and that’s what I’ve been paying for the past for many years. I don’t want it any more than that, so if it’s gonna be more than that, I can’t continue the service.

We have the system connected to three doors and a window downstairs, and then the motion detector. However, our understanding was that our two dogs and cat would not trigger the motion detector near one door. But every time I arm it, they trigger it. I can go online and disable that, but it's a rigamarole to do and I have yet to figure out how to do that from the keypad. I get a call right away if the dogs have tripped the alarm, as well. It’s connected to the garage door, too, so I can put it up or down remotely. Overall, our experience with Guardian Protection Services has been good.

I like the features in my system but I don't really like the window break sensors. I wish it actually had a sensor if the window was open because if I'm gonna be broken into, I feel like they would just pry open the window as opposed to breaking it. So, I'm hoping that eventually, I'll be able to have enough money to get the actual sensor. Other than that, I like the Stay and Away features and the smartphone features are easy to work with. My mother-in-law was watching my dog for a week and she was able to do it with no problems. So, that was cool. Having Guardian adds peace of mind and it feels safer. I would recommend them and I already have. I'm on an app and people were looking for a security system and asked who should they go with and I told them Guardian is the way to go.