Oh I'm all concerned now too. We have a freeze watch starting Friday night. It was 80 degrees for several days last week and now this! I'm completely inexperienced and have no clue what types of plants and trees will be okay or if I should try to cover everything. I'm most concerned about my conifers and JM's. Most of my conifers are at various stages. Larix and Metasequoia are all leafed out. Most of my conifers have just started breaking bud and some others haven't popped out yet. This is my first year with so many new plantings. EEEk! Should I cover everything that has broken bud? Should I cover the ones that haven't yet too? Do I need to cover my Japanese Maples, fruit trees, barberies, flowers, anything that grows. I'm sure my freshly planted rocks will do fine. =) I guess I should be asking, is there anything that will generally be okay and doesn't need covering? Thanks for helping the total newb and hope you folks don't get to irritated with educating me. =)

Before I thought to even ask or research about a security system on the forum, we already signed a contract with ADT. I was pretty happy because it was half the price of the first quote, and we are 2 miles from small town, and 20 miles for next largest town, so just never thought to check on a more local outfit. Okay so anyways, we just finished up our install the other day. So we are still on the learning cycle, which means we are not "live" with any alarms calling anyone unless it is fire. Okay so yesterday morning, my DH forgets and opens the door. So the count down begins. He keeps punching in the code, and telling it to Stay, like it was the dog. I guess he was thinking that since he was Staying, that should shut it off. Well it didn't. It was engaged so it needed to be code, then OFF. So the countdown has begun with the initial inside alarm, and it is talking to you, so everyone in the house hears it. I kept thinking, okay he is a highly intelligent fella, it is just a matter of time before he shuts it off. I guess everyone else in the house was thinking the same thing, but eventually I got up and the teenager in the house had also already begun his crawl out of bed and he turns it off, but not before the BIG siren goes off outside. Okay so anyways, this was at 6:40 yesterday morning. We don't have real close neighbors breathing down our neck, but they are plenty close to hear this blarring alarm going off inside and outside at 6:40 a.m. on a Saturday morning. So THIS morning, at 6:40 in the morning, guess who was out mowing his yard? Coincendence? Maybe lol, but I think not. haha We wouldn't be able to hear his mowing too awfully much anyways if we were still in bed, we are insulated pretty well, but I had already been up with the horses, but anyways, we got a kick out of it :-)

All done scanning...nothing found and MSE seems to be working correctly again after a restart....I guess all is well for now. Thank you for your help and concern...you probably know how we novices panic when something goes wrong :o)

We, too, have had an ADT system for about 17 of the 20 years we've lived here. It is monitored 24/7, but not by the police -- it's monitored by the ADT folks. I don't know how much it costs per month because Hubs pays that bill, but I know it's not bad. (Of course, peace of mind and security are worth any price they'd charge.) As for keeping windows open -- the way that a window is monitored is that there is a contact point on the inside of the frame, and a corresponding contact point on the part of the window that moves. When the two points are in contact with each other, everything is fine. When they lose contact with each other, it sets off the alarm. So, if you want to have a window open, the alarm installer can put the inside-the-frame contact point high enough to allow the window to be open enough to allow air/breezes in, but not high enough that someone could crawl through the space and into your home. Motion detectors can also be set so that the beam is low enough to catch a human going, for example, up the stairs, but high enough that your animals can roam through the house without being caught by the motion detector's beam. As Lynn just mentioned, if for some reason our alarm goes off (say, for example, Hubs opens the door from the breakfast nook to the back deck, but forgets to turn off the alarm), and we enter the proper code to turn off the alarm, all is well. If the wrong code is entered, ADT will immediately call us and ask for a preestablished code word. If we say the right word, all is well. If not, the police/sheriff are notified. If we don't answer the home phone, ADT will call our cell phones. We have two control pads for the system -- one is near the front door, and the other is upstairs in the master bedroom. When you enter the house when the alarm is on, you have a preset amount of time to enter the code to turn it off. We have plenty of time to come into the house from the garage and get to the keypad by the front door. We wanted the extra keypad in the master bedroom in case, Heaven forbid, we thought someone was attempting to break into the house during the night. We don't want to have to go downstairs to enter panic codes into the system. We live in an unincorporated area of Sacramento County, so in our case, the Sheriff's Office would be notified. And, we have to pay $75 to them every other year for an "alarm permit."