5 Ways To Help Protect Your Home From Burglars
Any home can be burgled at any time. It's not a nice thing to think about, but if you don't take the necessary precautions, your home can be at risk of robbery and costly damage. The following security tips provided here can help you can deter potential burglars or unwanted visitors when you're away, and help you to feel as safe and secure as you ought to feel within the comfort of your home.
1. Lights & Blinds
Burglary is often an opportunistic criminal act, and something as simple as keeping the blinds down will make criminals think twice about hopping into your home. Thieves do not want any sort of contact with homeowners, and by shutting the blinds you can hide away the nice TV set that might have caught their eye. If you keep the blinds closed when you're away, they won't know what items of value you have in your home.
It's always worth keeping financially and emotionally valuable possessions well away from windows and doors, as these will be the first things to go if a burglar enters your home.
But just because burgling is usually opportunistic is not to say that some thieves don't scheme and plan for stealing from the average public home. Indeed, some burglars carefully monitor houses for several days before making their move—and won't enter until they are satisfied that the house is definitely vacant.
This is a problem you can solve with timed lights. When you go away on holiday, set up these timers (available at many stores) and your lights will continuously switch on and off, creating the illusion that someone is home.
2. Deadbolts
The most obvious, and also most effective way to repel a potential thief is by installing a vast array of locks on all windows and doors. Burglars need to get in and get out very quickly, and if every window and door is nuisance to get through, they'll quickly abandon it. Unlike some criminals, burglars do not want to get caught under any circumstances, so anything that spooks them is a strong advantage, and installing several security doors and windows is one way to do that.
Keep in mind that many of the more seasoned thieves will know how to pick a typical lock or window in a matter of seconds, so by adding deadbolts to doors you have another strong line of defence if the first lock is burst open.
3. Seal Your Letterbox
It may feel like an inconvenience having to answer the door to the postman, but having a door with a sealed letterbox—or one without a letterbox altogether—can prove enormously beneficial when it comes to protecting your home from intruders.
Burglars often use letterboxes as a way of peering inside homes. This way they can see what the corridor looks like, what's on offer for the taking, and to sense movement to see if anybody is home. By bolting up your letterbox you can put off a surprisingly high number of thieves, who will recognize that your home may be too difficult to break into, and abandon the attempted burglary altogether.
4. Hidden Cameras
Fitting out your home with cameras sounds expensive and time-consuming, but with the right know-how, it needn't be either. Yes, having state-of-the-art CCTV cameras hooked up both inside and outside of your residence is a pricey investment, but there are ways to take footage of your home without having to pay extravagant costs.
Instead of looking into expert CCTV, simply use a couple of standard video cameras, and surreptitiously hide them in a few areas of your home. Placing a camera on top of a pile of what apparent junk items, or between two objects of minimal value, will allow you to witness any robberies through examination of video footage, which may prove to be a key piece of evidence when it comes to bringing the criminals to justice.
5. Make Some Noise
If there's one thing burglars hate more than getting caught, it's noise. By accumulating and setting up a variety of potential noise-making objects, you can frighten criminals away from your home.
This can involve something as simple as taking up your car keys to bed with you. If you do suspect someone is attempting to break into your home, then hit the car alarm button, or any button that'll make a bit of noise and get the lights to flash. Noise attracts attention, and chances are that potential thieves will scamper away at the sound of a shrieking car alarm for fear of being seen.
Fixing wind-chimes on your back door, or placing items such as the ironing board up against it at night, will force even the most feather-light thieves to cause havoc when trying to enter your home, and they'll promptly leave when they realize the noise that they've made. Many burglars will scout out the area around the doors first anyway, and most will deliberately avoid houses that have a variety of heavy, tricky and noisy objects set up around the doors.