Intruder detection · Bentel Security
You almost never choose it. You find it already fitted.
Bentel is an Italian manufacturer of control panels and detection, today in the same group as DSC. In many installations it is not bought: it is inherited. What to check on one already fitted, what can be reused and when it is cheaper to change it than to carry on patching it.
What Bentel is and where it turns up.
An Italian manufacturer of intruder detection control panels and of detection, today inside the same industrial group as DSC. It has been sold through distribution in Spain for many years, and that is where this page comes from: there are a great many of its installations in shops, residents' associations, offices, warehouses, consulting rooms and medium-sized industrial units.
So the real conversation almost never starts with «we want to buy a Bentel». It starts with «we have this fitted, the person who put it in does not come any more, and we do not know whether it works». Being able to answer that well is more use than reciting a catalogue.
And the honest answer is that an installation from this house that is well designed and maintained does its job without a fuss for years, and that an abandoned one is just as useless as any other brand in the same condition. What decides is not the logo on the lid.
How it's built.
The classic mid-range architecture: a board with its zones, a bus off which hang keypads, expanders, communicators and auxiliary power supplies, and partitions for arming different parts of the building separately.
The cabled zones are watched with end-of-line resistors. That is not fussiness: it is the difference between cutting a cable raising an alert and cutting a cable leaving a detector dead in silence. In inherited installations it is the first thing we look at, because a lot was cabled without end-of-line back when nobody asked for it.
The bus has the same limits as any other: distance, cross-section and current draw. Its faults do not look like a fault, they look like a ghost —a keypad going blank once a week, an expander that disappears and comes back— and they are chased for months if nobody measures the voltage at the furthest point. The wireless part, if there is one, usually turns up with batteries nobody has looked at in years.
The audit of one already fitted.
Seven checks, in this order. This report can be asked for from whoever maintains the system today. From us as well.
- The event log, before touching anything. How many alarms a month, at what hour and in which zone: that is where you see whether anybody arms the system, and that is where the pattern of the false alarms is.
- Which zones are disabled and since when. The zone that was disabled «one day» and stayed disabled is the number one cause of a system that is switched on and protects nothing. In an inherited one there is always at least one.
- The battery and the real autonomy, with everything hanging off it. A six-year-old battery is a panel that raises no alarm at night, and no screen tells you that.
- How it raises the alarm outwards, and whether that route is still alive. It is the check that gives the most surprises: many reported over the telephone line and stopped doing so the day the client moved to fibre. They looked fine and had spent years unable to alert anyone.
- Whether there is a second route and whether it is supervised. Without supervision, cutting the line is the quietest way of switching off a system from outside.
- The tamper detection on everything, junction boxes included: opening, covering or turning a detector has to raise an alert by itself.
- And the physical test, one by one: walking in front of every detector, checking the alert reaches the end of the route —panel, receiver and telephone—, with the time and the result. That is what does not get done, and the only thing that proves the system works.
How it behaves with false alarms.
The same as its siblings in the range: what rules is the detector and the place it is put. This house's catalogue includes its own detection and that helps the pieces fit together, but it does not change the physics.
The panel's tools are three, and in an inherited installation they are almost never configured: requiring two different detectors to see the same thing before firing, isolating on its own the zone that has fired several times in one arming, and the event log. What is not done is lowering the sensitivity so that alerts stop coming in: that swaps a noisy alarm for a deaf one.
The step that really changes the day-to-day is looking before you send somebody out. And here we declare what has to be declared: IRIS Neural is the NVMS of Infinity Neural, the other company in this group, which is to say our own product. It does not replace the panel: it puts an image on its alerts.
The grade, and the alarm receiving centre.
The EN 50131 standards classify alarm systems into security grades, and each grade demands specific things of the equipment, the cabling, the power supply and the tamper detection. The grade is set by the risk of the activity and, in many cases, by the insurance policy.
Equipment being declared for a grade and an installation meeting that grade are two different things: the second includes the whole assembly and the file. What grade each model from this house supports is read in its documentation — and in an installation from years ago it has to be read with the part numbers that are actually fitted, not with today's catalogue.
The question, to us as well, is what grade is being handed over and that it be handed over in writing. We do not state it here: it depends on the design, and it is asserted by whoever signs. In an inherited installation there is one possible answer nobody wants to hear: that what is there does not reach the grade needed. And connecting to an alarm receiving centre is another decision, with its own regulations and its own contract: who provides it is settled in a quotation, not on a website.
Reuse or replace.
What is almost always reused is the cable: the runs, the containment and often the detectors if they are well positioned. That is the expensive part of an installation and there is no reason to throw it away because the head end changes.
What is frequently changed is the communication outwards, because it is the piece that has become obsolete across a whole generation: where there was telephone dialling, today you need IP and mobile data with supervision. It is usually the change that adds the most security per euro, and it can be done without touching the rest.
The whole panel is changed when two or three things coincide: there are no reasonable spares, the zones needed cannot be added, there is no documentation and no keys, or the grade the insurance asks for cannot be reached. What we do not do is propose a new panel because it is easier to sell than a diagnosis: if what is missing is two detectors in the right place and a route for the alert, that is what gets quoted.
What we do with it.
- The written diagnosis of what is there, with the checklist above. It is handed over even if the client decides not to do the work with us: a report only handed over if you sign is not a report, it is a sales argument.
- The design for what is missing, zone by zone and with a night visit if the protection is at night: which detector, at what height and what moves there that is not a person.
- The partition plan, which in an inherited installation is almost always what has to be redone. If closing the office means arming the store where somebody is working, the system ends up disarmed out of convenience.
- The communication with two routes and supervision, and the check that the alert reaches the end: panel, receiver and the telephone of whoever has to find out.
- Power supply and autonomy calculated with everything hanging off it, and the battery with its date in the file.
- The commissioning with a certificate written beforehand, detector by detector, with the time and the result. And the documentation and the keys in the client's name: in an inherited installation that is half the value of the work, because for the first time there is a piece of paper saying what is there and who it calls.
Who operates it once we leave.
Arming and disarming, managing users and codes and looking up last night's log: the client runs that. The user levels exist for it and in inherited installations they are almost never used — there is usually one single code everybody knows, including people who no longer work there.
What the client does not touch is adding an expander, changing a zone's type, touching the entry and exit times, altering the reporting to the alarm receiving centre or upgrading firmware. Not to keep work for ourselves: a mistake there is not seen until the day the alarm was needed.
And the discipline of the isolations, which with this brand is what comes up most: each one with an expiry date and the inspection hunting them down, with its date in the report so the client sees how many months it had been like that. That, plus short training and a file saying which detector each number on the keypad is.
The other eight in this group.
Four control panels and five outdoor perimeter houses. None is better than another: what changes is how they grow, how they behave with the false alarm and what ground they hold up on.
Get started
Have you got one fitted and no idea whether it works?
It is the most repeated call about this brand. Tell us what is in the cabinet, how many zones it has, whether anybody arms it every day and when it was last tested detector by detector. With that we will tell you what can be reused, what is missing and what cannot be fixed.