Adelaide's middle suburbs are built from solid masonry — street after street of double-brick homes from the post-war decades, plus the older stone stock before them. It's why so many all-wireless alarm kits that work fine in a timber-frame house turn flaky here: solid brick walls attenuate wireless signal, and a kit designed around plasterboard assumptions ends up with detectors that drop out, batteries that drain fast from retransmission, and an owner who stops trusting the system. Alarm design for these homes is a genuine discipline — signal testing, hybrid architecture and retrofit cabling craft — and after 21+ years in the industry it's one of the jobs we most enjoy doing properly.
Get a Free QuoteWireless alarm devices talk to their panel by radio, and every wall between them takes a toll. Plasterboard barely registers; a double-brick internal wall takes a real bite; two or three of them between a back-bedroom detector and a hallway panel can push the link to the edge of reliability. Add a metal-backed splashback or a solid chimney breast in the path and the margin disappears entirely.
The failure isn't dramatic — it's intermittent, which is worse. Devices that mostly report, supervision warnings that come and go, batteries that drain quickly because the device keeps retransmitting at full power. The owner reboots, reseats, replaces batteries, and eventually stops arming the system. An alarm nobody arms is the most expensive kind of no alarm there is.
You cannot predict radio behaviour in a masonry house from a floor plan. Wall thickness, internal wall construction, wiring in the cavities, foil insulation in a renovated section — all of it shapes propagation in ways that only measurement reveals. So we test: signal levels checked at each proposed device location against realistic panel positions, before a single device is specced.
The test results drive the design honestly. Locations with strong, stable signal can take wireless devices with confidence; marginal locations get a wired run or a repositioned device — not a hopeful install and a callback. It's an unglamorous discipline that takes a little longer on the quote visit and saves years of intermittent faults afterwards.
The right answer for most double-brick homes is neither all-wired nor all-wireless — it's hybrid. A wired backbone carries the locations that matter most and the ones masonry makes hostile to radio: perimeter door contacts, key detectors, sirens. Wireless fills in where signal is genuinely strong and cabling would be disproportionately invasive — a detached studio, a spot where a heritage ceiling shouldn't be disturbed.
Hybrid panels make this natural: wired zones and wireless zones on one system, one app, one arming routine. The owner never sees the architecture — they see an alarm that simply works, every device reporting, no supervision faults, batteries lasting as they should. The engineering disappears into reliability, which is exactly where it belongs.
The good news about Adelaide's post-war brick stock is that it's kind to a careful cabler. Generous roof spaces sit over most of the floor plan, giving clean access to the top of nearly every wall. Internal walls with cavities take neat vertical drops to door frames and detector positions; where a wall is solid, routes run through the roof space and down adjacent cavities, cupboards and robes instead.
The craft is in what you don't see afterwards: drops planned so penetrations land behind furniture lines and inside robes, no surface conduit across living spaces, patching that disappears into the wall. Done properly, a retrofit wired system in a 1960s double-brick home is invisible everywhere except the keypad — and it will outlast every wireless component in the house.
Adelaide roof spaces host more life than owners like to think about — possums in the older leafy suburbs, rodents everywhere, and the scratching, thermal signatures and cable damage they bring. Detector placement has to respect that: detection kept out of the roof space itself, sensors positioned away from spots where ceiling movement or heat plumes from wildlife activity could nudge a marginal detector into false alarms.
Rodents also chew cable, so runs through the roof space are routed and protected with that in mind, and inspected during servicing. False alarm discipline is the quiet foundation of a system people keep using: an alarm that cried wolf twice last summer gets left disarmed in December, and every design decision that prevents a false trigger is worth more than any feature on the box.
Tell us about your property and we'll come back with practical options and honest pricing.