Your home is your castle and so you should treat it as such. But too many people leave their doors and windows unlocked, increasing the risk of losing all their possessions or worse, their families’ lives to malicious vandals and burglars who scour your neighbourhood’s streets at night.
It would be obvious to recommend you keep your doors locked and install a burglar alarm, but you likely already do these things. Instead, here are some more particular suggestions which you may not have considered, but all of them are essential if you want to protect your family and property.
Electric Gates
They sound expensive, but the cost of electric gates are declining year each year as more people begin throwing away their wooden counterparts and install much more hi-tech and efficient gates, which can be opened with the push of an intercom button.
Burglars who don’t have your access code will find it much more difficult to climb over or damage an electric gate, which can be metallic and, if you prefer, spiky. Their sturdiness can also withstand the weather and the passage of time.
Gate automation is also highly convenient since it doesn’t require you to get out of your car or house to physically open them. So electric gates are not only good for security purposes; they’ll soon be essential for modern, 21st century living.
Preventative Measures
It’s no good installing a burglar alarm but not taking any preventative measures which stop a burglar from getting inside your house in the first place. If you are aware of how a burglar’s mind works, you can remodel your home in a certain way so it loses some of its attractiveness.
You probably didn’t consider that having windows near your doors can be dangerous because someone could smash them and use their arm to open the door’s lock from the inside. For this reason, those windows require more attention than the windows for your house’s upper floor.
If you install double-glazing windows, the glass is much harder for thieves to break though. All exterior doors should be made of a tougher material than the interior doors, so that they are much harder to kick in and they should have deadbolts so they’re harder to lock-pick.
Don’t Advertise
This may sound a bit paranoid, but you’ll never know who is watching or listening if you announce that you’re going away or that you have some new, alluring purchases.
Many people change their landline answer-phone so they tell callers that they are away on holiday. Anyone can trace your phone number to your address with a phone book and a thief can easily find out you have valuable goods if you throw out empty cardboard boxes with brand names printed on them into your wheelie bin.
If you already draw your blinds to keep tempting items out of view, then there’s no reason why you can’t go a little bit further and keep your wheelie bins off the kerb and keep your holiday plans between yourself and a trusted neighbour. It’s also recommended you hire someone to trim your grass and shrubberies when you’re away so the house looks like it is still being occupied.
Motion Sensors
Alongside automated gates, these are most effective gadgets when it comes to home security. These electronic devices detect the movements of people and can be connected to a burglar alarm, so you’ll be woken up if there are any intruders approaching. It picks up any movement at all so the alarm can ring before the intruder’s fingertips even touch anything and unlike the gates, these are fairly inexpensive to obtain and can be installed with very little fussiness.
Aimee Coppock is a writer who believes that the security of your home is paramount. Therefore she recommends researching security systems such as motion detectors and gate automation kits to help you to protect your property from the threat of a potential burglary.