09/10/2026
Find your alarm panel's battery date. Open the panel box. There is a sealed battery in there with a date printed on it. Most last three to five years. Read the date out loud. If it is older than five years, it is not backing anything up — it is a brick with terminals, and it will announce that during the next outage, at night, when the panel goes quiet instead of loud. It is the least expensive thing in your entire security setup to replace and the one most likely to be forgotten.