Intruder alarms in Newtownabbey, wired to how you live.

Newtownabbey is one borough with two very different housing patterns. Rathcoole, Monkstown and much of Glengormley are 1960s and 1970s estates of terraced and semi-detached houses, built close together on the hill above Belfast Lough. Jordanstown and the newer developments off the Doagh Road are more recent builds with garages and gardens. Both need an alarm, but the wiring behind the plasterwork differs, so the first job on any visit is deciding whether cable can run in the loft and under floors, or whether wireless will save cutting into finished walls.

The borough also has a serious amount of commercial floor space. Mallusk, off the M2 and the A8, is one of the larger industrial estates in County Antrim, with warehouses, trade counters and distribution units close together. A break-in there is rarely opportunistic, so alarms combine full perimeter coverage with shock sensors on shutters and roller doors, tied to a system a manager can check from a phone.

• Wireless and hybrid Pyronix and Texecom kits for estate housing where rewiring is disruptive
• Shutter and roller door contacts for Mallusk trade units and warehouses
• External sounders sited to be heard, not just seen, on terraced streets
• App control so a manager away from a Mallusk unit can check status without a site visit

A Pyronix or Texecom system can be wired, wireless or hybrid, and the right answer depends on the building more than on preference. In an older Rathcoole or Monkstown terrace, lifting floors and chasing walls to run cable disturbs a house that is otherwise finished, so a wireless panel with door contacts, pet-friendly motion detectors and a wireless sounder usually goes in faster and with far less mess. In a house still at first-fix stage, or a Mallusk unit being fitted out, cable is cheap to run before the plasterboard or the racking goes up.

Whichever route suits the building, the panel connects to an app on your phone, so you get a notification the moment a door contact or motion sensor is triggered, and you can arm or disarm the system remotely if someone forgets on the way out. Pet-friendly detectors are set to ignore cats and small dogs, so you are not disarming the alarm every time the dog wanders through the hall. Monitoring, if you want a third party watching the system, is something we can set up and explain, never something we assume you want.

A survey settles it properly, but these are the patterns we see most.