Over the past month I've been rewiring my second floor for high voltage. which has turned out to be the most difficult fishing I've ever done in my life. 12/3 really can be more of a pain then I ever knew.
Anyway back on point. I'm debating on using a simple 120V smoke detector system from Kiddie or calling in some favors and putting in a full burglar/fire alarm in the house.
Security isn't a huge issue but I do live a couple miles down the road from 250,000 of my closest friends so it certainly would be nice to have door contacts active at night. But my real thought was to put a decent fire alarm in. 115 year old wood tends to go up rather quickly and we're hoping to have kids in the house soon, so now is the time to do it. The system from Kiddie has a nice bonus of having low voltage lights in the alarms that light up when their triggered and will run on the backup battery if the power fails. Built in emergency lighting. I haven' t seen anything like this on the low voltage alarm side but I gaurentee some of you have done emergency lighting in houses, without using big blinking exit signs. Or is the only realistic option to tie an alarm panel into a lighting control system?

It is now your turn to be the nasty DIYer who calls in a company for a free design, then does it himself....

Just call in somebody big, not some local guy, so that the sales time lost at your place will not be his bread and butter for even a day.

Seriously? You mentioned calling in some favors, and I bet those guys would be pretty good at answering these questions, and would like to do it if you already have some kind of relationship with them.

I had a DIY guy that installed his own Apex Destiny 6100 with a RS-232 interface, all run to his computer that controlled his X-10 stuff. I give the guy props because he found the stuff cheaper than what I could sell it to him for and he did it all with no tech support calls. The control software was HomeSeer. The homeseer program reads open and closures in the security including the fire and his lights would come on with motion det. or they would flash on a burg. He also had a light sensor to turn on and off landscaping lights. I would say minus his intelligence, that he had about $3000 in his poor-boy automation system. Not bad.