Increasing Home Security Means More Than Just A Security Alarm
Remington 870 – America’s Favorite Home Protection
How would you rob your own home? When law enforcement officers want to catch criminals they have to think like criminals. If you want to keep criminals out of your home you need to do the same and conduct a vulnerability assessment of your home. Essentially all this entails is going through and planning how you would rob your own home. Through the process of doing this you will or should identify the most critical vulnerabilities that a crook is likely to exploit. Then you can take corrective actions to make it more difficult for a criminal to target your residence.
Here are some easy items that you can do yourself to beef up your home security.
Home Security: Exterior
Lighting. Utilize a combination of ground / landscape lighting as well as dusk to dawn lights and flood lights. Secondary Motion detecting lights are good to add as well. Note: Solar landscaping lights also work well as an emergency area light inside the home if the power goes out.
Flood Light
Infrared driveway alarms, for those with suitable driveways.
Eliminate trees and shrubs that may provide unseen entry and egress from your property (at least in the areas close to your home).
Plant nasty mean and thorny shrubs or bushes around windows or in areas that a crook may use to approach your home with the cover of darkness.
Use a good concealment device to hide a spare key well away from the entry area.
A Key Concealment Device Disguised As A Sprinkler Head
Always leave at least one vehicle parked in the driveway (if possible) when you are not home.
Make sure your remote control garage door opener is stored out of sight in your vehicle. Leaving it visible on the middle console gives a crook an easy way to get in your home. In times of hightened security just bring the garage door opener in the home at night.
Have a real or fake home security cameras covering the main entrances. This logitech camera uses the home electrical wiring as its network and records the images directly to my computer hard drive. Here is a link for the newer version http://www.logitech.com/en-us/webcam-communications/video-security-systems/master-systems/devices/7252
Motion Detecting Security Camera.
Get an outside dog. Consider obedience training.
Home Security: Interior
Get an inside dog. Consider potty training 
Dead bolts on all external doors, including the door coming in from the garage.
If possible make sure the exterior doors are steel cased doors or solid hardwood.
Cut a broomstick to fit in the door track of a sliding glass door. Also have a pin lock installed in it as well. Here is an article on how to install a pin lock on your sliding glass door http://www.diynetwork.com/how-to/how-to-add-a-lock-to-a-sliding-glass-door/index.html
Place a small bell just over the doorway so it rings when the door is opened. Much like many business do to let the owner know they have a customer. A little bell ringing may not sound like much, but it might be enough to wake you or your dog. And it may be enough to scare an uncertain thief off because they might think they were busted. Note: This is also good if you have young children and you want to be able to hear if they open the door to go outside and play without you knowing about it.
Door Bell
During times of heightened security place a audio/video baby monitor close to the most likely entrance, or at two or more entrances. These monitors have excellent sound sensitivity and can be found online used for very reasonable prices. If you are using more than one receiver make sure you put the one for the front door by one person and the one for the back door by the other person. Otherwise if you have them both next to you it may be hard to tell which entrance the disturbance is at, which may slow down your reaction time.
Keep your vehicle keyless entry key fob next to your bed, so that you can activate the cars alarm/horn if someone enters the home.
It almost goes without saying but an ultrabright led flash light on a night stand next to your weapon of choice is also very handy for home security. I also keep a nice small child sized aluminum baseball bat handy as well. For a great selection of super high quality flashlights checkout http://www.goinggear.com
A good loud whistle or sports air horn is also a good way to scare the crap out of the would be thief who is trying to gank your new led tv. And it serves the double purpose of waking other family members so that they can either be alert to assist or to move to a preplanned hiding area or safe room (age dependent of course).
Lower your phone’s ringer / answering machine volume. Burglars can easily find your phone number online or by digging through your trash. Then they just call it while standing close to the door and wait to hear if it gets picked up by the machine. If the volume is lowered so it can’t be heard outside the door, then it is one less tool they may use against you.
Leave a radio and the lights on, both inside and outside on when you leave. Most homes broken into are dark homes with poor lighting and many are not even locked at all.
Install peep holes in solid exterior doors.
Close drapes nightly and to the street side during the day, so that thieves can’t easily see in your home.
If you have pains of glass that run along your doors vertical edges, install a deadlock that can only be opened from the inside with a key.
Full blown security alarm systems are fine, if you can afford them, but Radio Shack and other companies also have several other intrusion alarms that can be effective as well. Here is a portable one from Radio Shack http://www.radioshack.com/product/index.jsp?productId=2102584
What Sort Of DIY Improvements Have You Made To Increase Your Home Security?
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Always like following your posts, and I thought I’d help augment one of your tips. I particularly liked the baby monitor tactic, and if you’re runnin’ a one man show, it’s worth advising that people label the monitors to avoid confusion. A Brother labeler or even just using a Sharpie marker would work.
Just label both mic side and receiver side with the same name – Front Door, Back Door, Kitchen, Secret Harem Entrance, etc…
Great post!
Thanks for the assist! Please feel free to comment as often as you like. I appreciate the feedback, good or bad. Cheers jj
Good post JJ. I like the inside dog, outside dog tactic. Great minds think alike. So many people have one or the other. Good dogs can really help with security by providing more sets of eyes and ears, especially on a large property. Vigilant neighbors and an active neighborhood watch are also important. (Active, but not so active they wind up in jail before the crunch, lol.) I guess there is a use for nosey, retired neighbors after all.
If you use peep-holes, I would get the kind that have a cover that slides down and blocks the vision port when not in use so they can’t use a peep hole reversal lens and I’d keep the lights brighter outside than inside at the peep holes, just like windows. You don’t want to put your eye up to it and catch a round in the face when they see the light go dim in the peep hole.
Cameras get around some of the problems, but are expensive and dependent on electricity. Cameras and fake cameras are a help, but I would be sure to store the video data (and any other mission-critical data) on a PC that’s well hidden somewhere or, better yet, off site. Computers are often things that robbers or burgalars take and you don’t want to loose your data. Fire and natural disasters are more reasons for an offsite data cache.
I would like to use the Dakota Alert system one day. It is a MURS radio setup that has magnetic driveway sensors to alert you of cars at your entry or on your drive and motion sensors you can install in zones to cover lines of drift. You can connect it to a call box and have it call to you radio or phone. Some ham radios exist that are capable of monitoring MURS on a second channel.
Martin, Great ideas! How much would a MURS radio system cost, any idea?
Hope For Zombies,
What are some of the upgrades you would recommend in addition to what I have listed here?
Also, if you live in an area where animal codes are not a problem, or you live in the country, get some Geese as pets. They are natures alarm system. Nothing, nothing will enter your SO without them letting you know!
*AO. Dang auto correct!
Dang Fat Fingers!
Tony, Great point about Geese. I had dogs all of my life growing up and they did well, but for the few years that we had Geese we would always know when someone or something was lurking about! They make a ton of noise when sounding the alarm.
If you can’t afford a safe, but need somewhere at home to put jewelry, the best thing I’ve seen is a fake electrical outlet. They are sold on the internet, but you could probably make one easily enough. Then just cut a hole to fit in the dry wall and install. Be sure to have it at the same height as the others in the room and to space it so it looks normal. Even if the thief knew you had one of these, there would not be enough time to go around checking every outlet in the house.
My dogs are both over 100lbs and black as pitch…so you can’t see them until it is too late. We also have a gate at the end of our half mile driveway. We put crushed tile at the bottom of the driveway; it makes different sounds when it is driven across than the gravel does, and that sound seems to carry better. All of this and the tree line around the house itself (one cannot tell if there is a house here at all because the barn takes up the streetside space) really is better than one would think. And if all of that somehow fails, we all own and know how and when to use our firearms.
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