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Home security is a mammoth issue, but this is nothing new – it always has been an issue for parents and home owners. The problem is that family structure has altered. Not so long ago, people had much larger families and mothers or grandmothers were at home to look after the kids. With six, eight or even ten kids in a family, the house was never empty so burglars did not have a lot of opportunity. There was more social cohesion too, so criminals were loath to steal from their neighbours. So they attacked shops instead.

However, shops and other businesses started using electronic burglar alarms as the prices fell. These security units were so effective that burglars turned to stealing from people’s homes, which is made easier by the fact that the kids are in school and the parents are at work all day. American federal statistics indicate that domestic burglaries are up nearly ten percent since 2004. So, what can you do to put off a burglar?

If your residence is left unoccupied for a large part of the day because your offspring are at school, nursery or a baby-sitters’ and you are at work, consider getting some home help or joining a neighbourhood watch scheme. If you had a cleaner coming and going, it would provide some activity to deter thieves.

Becoming a member of a neighbourhood watch would convey to your neighbours that you are concerned about security and they will keep an eye on your property while you are out. Get your self a dog too, although be aware that they can be easily poisoned, if the crook has access to them..

Install an electronic surveillance system. This could be a monitored or tape system. Monitored is the best. An added bonus to a surveillance system is that you can be certain what your baby sitter gets up to while you are out too. You can turn it off when you yourself are at home or just leave the outside cameras on.

Another additional benefit with a home security system is that you can get a panic button linked to the system’s main external siren and strobe light. If you are attacked or worried, you can trigger the alarm by pushing a button on a device that you can wear around your neck. They can also be built into watches and brooches. These personal panic buttons are a good idea for the elderly and single women offering peace of mind to those living alone.

A monitored surveillance system will also warn you if your house catches fire while you are asleep or out or if someone is mooching around your garden. Often the operator of the system will phone the emergency services too after they have alerted you.

A good surveillance system can be used as a bargaining chip with your insurance broker to gain some hefty discounts on your premium. If you have a small business that you run from home, you may be able to off-set some or all of the costs against your business too and a good home surveillance system can boost the selling price of your house, because it makes it that one step more complete, like having uPVC doors and windows and a timber deck.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with home security systems comparison. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.

Security is an essential aspect of life, but then it always has been. It is normal for parents to try their best to take care of their families and it is normal and even a legal requirement for an employer to ensure the safety of his or her staff. Part of the way we carry out these tasks is to defend the environment in which we live and work – our homes and our offices or other places of work.

A proper security system for our homes and businesses is usually an electronic system. Windows and doors – ie likely entry points – will be monitored by sensors. In order to maintain an operational security system, it is necessary to use a regularly changed password system. In a home the keypad will usually be numeric only, but you should change the password at least every month and possibly even every week.

For example, if you have teenage children or older, they will be inviting friends back. These friends will be able to see you child entering the password. This can be even more serious if the person is a boyfriend or girlfriend who then gets dumped.

Similarly in an office or other place of work, it is a good idea to have pass cards that can be canceled if the employee leaves the company. A lot of damage is caused every year to material goods by disgruntled ex-employees and old boy- and girlfriends.

You can assist passers-by and police by leaving some light on inside your building. Frequent passers-by, neighbours and police will get used to seeing lights on, so if a burglar switches them off, they will become suspicious.

Burglars do not like light. Similarly, do not let bushes, shrubs or trees hide possible entry points. Keep them cut back so that people can see any doubtful activity. You would be astonished how many people just sit in their windows all day watching.

Outdoor security lighting is an excellent way of deterring criminals at night. Install a few solar garden lights that are activated by passive infra red motion sensors and they will be inexpensive to run. The good thing about them is that they do not proclaim their presence to the would be intruder, but they will catch him or her in a floodlight when he gets onto your property.

Another tip is to nail carpet gripper just under the top edge on the inside of your garden fence. Anyone trying to haul himself up over your fence will have a very horrible surprise and leave DNA for the police.

If your business or home has an open door policy in order to allow clients or your kids to walk in, install doorbells or chimes that are activated by under carpet sensors, door sensors or PIR’s, so that employees or family can not be caught by surprise. It is very useful, because if your busy secretary doubles as a greeter of walk-in clients, it will ensure that she does not miss anybody or keeps anybody waiting.

Owen Jones, the author of this writer, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with home security systems comparison. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.

It is entirely normal that we all want to keep our homes and businesses safe and well protected, but there are many means in which this can be achieved. The cheapest and most cost effective method is exterior security lighting

It really is a no brainer, bad lighting can make a home or business a much more appealing object than the house next door because it has less satisfactory exterior security lighting. Burglars look for poorly lit points of entry into premises that seem to contain wealth, so when you are designing the security system for your home or business you should try to think like a criminal.

Look at your buildings from the outside, or look at someone else’s first and ask yourself, how you would get in there if you had to. Imagine that you forgot your keys or that there is a serious problem in your office. How would you get in? This is where the criminal gets in and you must learn how to block his every move.

Ten years ago, I lived in a bungalow alone with my small, knee-high dog and armed robbers attacked me in my home, in spite of the fact that I had a reasonable home security system. Do not let it happen to you. My blunder was that I had inadequate exterior security lighting.

They had cut my phone line during the day and because I used a cell phone for most of my calls, I did not realize. Also my dog was sick, but I did not realize that she had been poisoned too. At eleven o’clock at night there was a knock on the front door and I opened it, thinking that it was a neighbour in distress.

A man charged in and over-powered me and the rest was not nice. However, the whole regrettable affair could have been prevented, if I had thought like them..

I was in the habit of drawing the curtains when I got home, so I did not see that they had removed the lamps from my exterior security lighting too.

My advice is to check your exterior security lighting every night when you get home and keep the bushes or shrubs cut low around your front and back doors. Make sure that your exterior security lighting is working every evening and make sure that you can see who is buzzing your door bell.

Supply your garden and your doors with lots of light. Let them be on motion sensors and check who is at your door from a side window that looks out onto your front door. I had a gorgeous frosted glass pane in my front door, but that is no use. I could not recognize anyone through it.

Have a panic button fitted by your doors, a big one, so that if you are surprised you can lash out and still hit it and above all make your next door neighbours conscious that if your external siren sounds, that you are in trouble and that you need help immediately. If you are not in trouble, you can always say sorry later.

Owen Jones, the writer of this writer, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with home security systems comparison. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.

People have always tried to protect themselves and their families, just like most animals do. In very early days, cavemen protected their caves by lighting fires outside the entrance to discourage interlopers and wild animals. Later on, man learned how to increase his security by training dogs to safeguard him and his family. Later still, houses and then doors were invented; bars and locks arrived soon after that.

However, until a few decades ago in the west, people lived in extended large families. A family could consist of six-to-ten children and the mother and the grandmother would often live there too. This made home security systems extraneous from the early 18th Century to the 1930’s, which were fairly peaceful times. After the Second World War, families were not so large and new families got their own house away from their parents.

Nowadays, both parents are likely to be working and the children are probably at school. This means that many houses are left unoccupied during the day, making them easy plunder for burglars. In fact, the number of household burglaries has increased by almost 10% in the last five years according to American government figures. Furthermore, according to a survey, forty percent of home burglaries were carried out due to inappropriate locks and doors.

ANSI (American National Standard Institute) produced a standard for deadbolt locks for external doors which is very hard to beat. If you are worried about your external doors, you should seek these ANSI deadbolts out, but beware, there are many copies. However, regardless of the sort of lock, the quality of the door is just as crucial. Its thickness and composition can also be a disincentive. After all, why put an expensive deadbolt on a door made of cardboard?

There are about 14,000,000 home burglaries every year in the United States and many of them are avoidable. The first stage that you should attain in home security is strong doors and sturdy locks. Deadbolts on exit doors is a good idea.

Once you have completed that, get some exterior security lighting that reacts to either motion or body heat. The former sort are microwave and the latter passive infra red sensors. These sensors will also contain a daylight sensor so that they will only become active at night. The sensors will also save you money by activating the powerful halogen floodlights only when someone enters the range of the sensor’s beam.

Once you have done that, you should think about a home security alarm system. This should consist of contact sensors on all exterior doors and windows, vibration sensors on all widows to alarm you in case of breakage and PIR or microwave motion sensors in the corridors and hallways.

Then, if you want to go even further in your home security system, you can fit surveillance cameras on each exterior wall of the house and maybe one in the interior too. You do not have to take all these precautionary measures at once, if you are short of cash, but they should be taken in that sequence.

Owen Jones, the author of this writer, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with home security systems comparison. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.

There are many things that families and businesses do in order to safeguard their property. One technique that is often taken in the name of security is the addition of security bars to doors and windows. In spite of the inherent benefits of securing property, these bars often present risks of endangering the people inside.

One thing remains accurate, most burglars will keep moving rather than attempt entering into a home that has security bars on doors and windows. Home protection is the only security that these bars supply however for many, the risks involved in having these bars on windows is not worth the small degree of protection that is provided. In other words, the good of these bars is greatly outweighed by the negatives.

A lot of people do not purchase new security bars but rather rely on the same bars that have covered the windows of the home or business for many years. Some of these are rusted and virtually impossible to take away. In emergency situations, every second matters and these bars can be the very things that trap people inside a burning or flooding building.

Security bars are no longer the cheap alternative to traditional alarm systems and monitoring services that they were touted to be in the past. In fact, more often than not the present a greater risk than they are a benefit to business and homeowners. Many larger companies offer free installation of alarm systems and alarms as well as monthly monitoring services at reasonable rates. More significantly not only are these monitoring services presented for breaks-in, but also for fire and smoke as well as panic button services.

Security bars may have had a time and place, but they have been supplanted by something that is much more effective at deterring criminals as well as something that offers a greater degree of security for the most precious assets of any home or business – the people inside. The costs concerned in monthly monitoring seem great but most will find that the value this service offers if and when it is ever called upon is well worth every penny.

Options to burglar bars that are not terribly expensive include planting thorny bushes below windows and keeping them trimmed back just enough that they do not block a view of the windows. Most intruders do not want a difficult entry point and they certainly do not want to be wounded during the process by prickly plants. Lighting is another alternative that is essentially less expensive than it would be to fit burglar bars. Intruders do not want to be observed. If the area surrounding your home and business is well lit, it will serve as a deterrent. Explore options such as this before resorting to security bars.

To answer the question of whether or not security bars are worth the risks for home or business protection the answer would be a loud “No!”. There are other defensive measures that can be taken in order to discourage intruders that present far less risk to family members and employees. These options should be implemented rather than those that pose further risks to those you are trying to look after.

Owen Jones, the writer of this writer, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with home security systems comparison. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.

These days people are becoming more concerned about their home security, chiefly because of the increasing crime rate. Even homes that have an older security system should be checked to see whether their security system is out of date or passable.

It is not so much that an older system may stop working, but technology advances very quickly and your sensors may not be the best variety or even the variety that suit your home the best.

The kind of security system that you should be using can change as the constituent members of your family changes. For example, if you have just had a baby, you could hook up a surveillance camera to the bedroom or put a motion sensor pointing along side a toddler’s bed so that you know if he or she gets up out of bed.

There are many varieties of security systems, including wired, wireless, monitored and Internet. The Internet wireless system is or at least can be fully automated.

That means that you can operate it through the hand set or any online device like a laptop or desktop computer. This means that you can check up on your home from your place of work or when you are away on holiday.

If surveillance cameras are part of your home security system, then you will be able to see and check up on your home on your computer monitor from anywhere in the world. If you connect sensors to some table lamps around your house, you will even be able to turn lights on and off to make it look as if you are at home when you are in fact hundreds of miles away. Put the TV on such a sensor and you can even switch that on and off as well.

If you put a surveillance camera in your children’s bedrooms and the living room, you could check up on the baby sitter or your business cash register on your WAP enabled mobile phone or PDA. This type of automated can be fitted by a competent DIYer, but is designed to be fitted by professionals.

This kind of automated system is very comforting. Imagine being able to check up on your home, children or business by watching live video footage on any computer or Internet phone anywhere in the world!

An automated security system is not cheap, but is worth the peace of mind that it brings. You could get near total automated home or business security by the end of next week. Pay for it over time, if you have too, but they are not as costly as you may imagine

Owen Jones, the writer of this writer, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with home security systems comparison. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.

Nowadays a house or even an apartment is not thought of as complete without an adequate home security systems Not having one often has an effect on the market price of the property too – downwards if your home security system is found wanting or even non existent. People are just too worried about the rising levels of crime. One of the problems for home owners is that stores and other businesses have got their act together and are very well protected in general. This has forced the average burglar too turn his attention to houses.

The number of burglaries has risen by almost 10% over the last five years because of this phenomenon so now every household should be thinking about upgrading, replacing or fitting a new home security system. It is a shame that the situation has come to this, but it is so. I myself was attacked in my home by burglars ten years ago. They tied me up and threatened me with a knife. They also threatened to skin my dog in front of me. It was not pleasant.

Modern technology makes it easy to fit a very good home security system, without having to spend a great deal of money. Often when you have work done on your home or your car, the labour element of the cost is more than that of the parts you wanted. It can be the same with the installation of a home security system. However, a wireless home security system can be fitted by any reasonably capable person, which allows you to save money or just get a better system.

If you can run a wire from a fuse box and climb a ladder you can fit a home security system yourself. With older wired systems, it was tricky to hide the wires that ran to the sensors. You had to insert them behind coving and skirting boards an chase them into the plaster. It is a lot of work to do it correctly, but it is simpler with a wireless system.

If you go wireless, the only thing you will have to do or have done is wire the central control box directly to the fuse box and wire up the external siren too. After that you can just fix the proper sensors in the proper places and you are finished. All of this is explained in the instructions, which I suggest you scan while you are in the store in case they are in badly translated Chinese.

You can take the basic home security system as far as you like. Modern wireless technology allows many extras and variations. A basic system would consist of the control box, the external siren and all the sensors, but you ought to add external security lights to this as a necessity. They can be wirelessly linked to the control box too.

Then you could add surveillance cameras and a speaker-phone on the front door. All of these things can relay information to your control box and from there to a PC, if required. The Internet can be used as an interface to control your system as well, if you want – even from work or while on holiday!

A wireless home security system is a very adaptable piece of equipment, but is not that complicated to install, go to the mall as soon as you have time to get some brochures.

Owen Jones, the author of this writer, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with home security systems comparison. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.

When people think of home security, they are inclined to think of electronic surveillance systems. However, there are other methods to protect yourself and your family from harm and burglars. I will give you my top ten tips for home security.

1] Windows are really the key to home security. Window-stays become loose or sloppy as they get older and sometimes you can get a window-stay to jump off its peg by thumping the outside window frame. Fit window stay locks

2] Doors must be robust, well-hung on solid hinges and have secure locks. Fit deadlocks, especially on external doors.

3] Spare keys should not be secreted near the door under a mat, a flower pot or a stone. If you want to leave a key with a neighbour, select the neighbour cautiously. Be wary of those with teenage kids, their friends may become aware that the spare key in the fruit bowl is to your house.

4] Tools that can help a burglar must be locked away. Keep your shed and garage doors locked and if you have a ladder, chain and lock it to a fixed point like a wall.

5] Dogs are useful for home security, but they should not be relied on. Some thieves will kill a dog to get in. If you leave your dog in the house, get a box to fit inside your door to collect whatever comes in, lock the letter box closed or seal it off permanently. If you leave the dog in the yard, try to get a neighbour to check up on it from time to time.

6] Plants and bushes should not be permitted to grow big enough to block anyone’s view of windows and doors. Passers-by and ‘nosy neighbours’ are a big deterrent to burglars, but if no one can see a ground floor widow, the burglar can gain access unobserved. if you do want bushes under your windows, make them tough, thorny ones.

7] Boundary walls or fences are your first line of defense. They can be a good deterrent, if you get the design right. Some people embed broken glass into the top of the wall, but this can be against the law and can hurt unsuspecting cats. The best thing to do is nail carpet-gripper just below the top, inside edge of the wall. Anyone putting their hands over the wall to pull themselves up will get a very nasty shock and leave DNA.

8] Valuables should not be put on show near windows. Your house is your home not a presentation case. Put your TV, DVD player and video recorder in a cabinet, maybe get a safe for your valuables and conceal that too.

9] External lighting is a key part of nocturnal security. Get exterior lights that are activated by motion (microwave) or heat (passive infra red), put at least one on each outside wall of your house.

10] Electronic surveillance systems are a necessity these days. You do not need cameras, but they are helpful for identifying intruders. Your home security system can be wired or wireless, monitored or not.

These top ten home security tips should prevent your home from becoming an easy target for burglars.

Owen Jones, the writer of this piece, writes on many topics, but is currently involved with wired home security systems. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.

These days everybody is anxious about the security of their homes and rightly so! According to official American government figures, the number of house burglaries has increased by nearly ten percent in the last five years to about fourteen million per year.

That is a great deal of homes. I was burgled ten years ago and I have studied and done my best to never be one of those statistics again. In this piece, I will pass on some of my home security tips on how to make your home unappealing to burglars.

The first thing to think about is whether you have anything in your garden, shed or garage that will help a thief get into your house. Things like ladders, crow-bars, screwdrivers, sledge hammers. If you do, then lock them away. Keep the shed and garage doors locked at all times. If you have a ladder that will not fit in the shed or garage, chain and padlock it to a brick wall, so that nobody can use it to get in.

Never believe that your home is less at risk just because you or someone else is inside it. Some burglars are crazy and it is easier to ask someone where the money is than to try to find it yourself. It is easier to demand the keys to the safe than to break the lock. I know. thieves came into my house while I was at work. They saw my safe, but could not get into it, so they came back three nights later when I was at home. It was truly not pleasant.

Do not put a spare front or back door key under the mat, a flower vase or near-by rock. Thieves expect people to do that and it is the first place they look. If you are thinking about leaving a key with a neighbour, pick your neighbour carefully. In fact choose the family carefully. Does the family have teenage kids? If so, could their friends learn that that ’spare key’ is to your house? Do you trust all the friends of that kids? Do you even know them?

Beware of strangers. I do not mean be fearful, but someone needing to make an urgent call because of a ‘breakdown’, could be casing your house or sizing you up. If you want to help, make the call for them or direct them to the nearest public telephone booth or a shop.

Keep all your doors and windows locked. If practical locked closed, when you are away from the house, but you can get window-stay locks so that you can lock a fanlight window open a few inches too. This is very helpful in the summer or if you have animals. Lock upstairs windows too – your neighbour may have a loose ladder that a thief can make use of.

Do not display your valuables unnecessarily. Video recorders, DVD players and even the TV can be put in cabinets. Jewellery should be put in a box or a safe. Cash the same. Your house is a home, not a presentation case to would be thieves.

My last home security tip to make your home unappealing to thieves is to stay alert and to warn your neighbours of any slip-ups they are making too. If you can elevate the general awareness of crime in the people around you, everyone will be a lot safer.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with wired home security systems. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.