7 Tips and Tricks to Keep Your Home Safe

You may love doing DIY on your property, or indulge in a spot of gardening, but whilst those are both fun or relaxing activities (as long as you don’t hit your thumb with a hammer) home protection should always be a top priority. In the UK there is an average of 34 burglaries per hour. To help you get back to the fun stuff, here is 7 ways to improve your home security.

1. Protect your doors

Step one is making sure that no burglar can simply gain access to your house via the front door. Inspect all your doors and windows, and ensure that they have suitable locks that are strong enough to withstand the force of someone trying to kick them open.

On day one of moving into a property, you should change the locks to ensure you don’t have any former occupants with a key still able to access your new home. Be sure to add a deadbolt and strike plate. If you are keen on setting up a smart home, you can integrate a video doorbell and consider upgrading to smart locks.

2. Light up the surrounding landscape

Darkness is the friend of unwanted visitors. If you want to deter strangers from entering your property, place lighting in your front and back gardens that will help eliminate hiding spaces for these shady characters.

Lighting along pathways, outdoor structures, and around your property entrances will all help to make intruders more cautious and liable to go after easier targets. In addition, having plenty of light around your property will help prevent trips and falls for you and other legitimate visitors.

If you don’t want to permanently light up the area, you can opt for motion-activated lights. These can be stand-alone or integrated into a house alarm system.

3. Set up a House Alarm System

House alarm systems in the UK are less common than in the USA, but their popularity is growing amongst the security conscious. It is now easy to pick up an all-in-one system that comes with everything you need to secure your home and keep it protected.

Alarm systems often start with a hub into which all other devices are wirelessly connected. Window and door sensors are the first devices to add. Place them on all doors and windows to be alerted any time one is open when the alarm system is armed.
Cameras, Motion detectors, and a wall-mounted alarm are all great visual deterrents. Burglars prefer easy prey, so seeing an alarm waiting to erupt into noise and other methods of being detected and recorded is going to put them off.

External cameras are great deterrents, but also perfect for gathering evidence. A burglar may think to cover their face when attacking your home but may have forgotten to do so for the days before when they were casing the property.

4. Add indoor CCTV Cameras

In the UK, indoor CCTV cameras are becoming increasingly common. Many reported burglaries have been foiled by the presence of both external and indoor cameras, even making news headlines.

You can buy stand-alone security cameras or cameras that come as part of a complete home security setup. Whichever route you go, we recommend you look for a security camera that features all of the following features:

• Motion Detection
• Night Vision
• Wi-Fi capability (for easy set up)
• Storage options – local or cloud-based
• Two-way audio

The last point on our list, two-way audio, is a great function to have. Because of the way that devices have become integrated with apps on our phones, you will now receive notifications when your camera detects motion, and the audio function allows you to listen in to their conversations or alert them to the fact that you are watching, hopefully resulting in them quickly departing from your house.

For consumer-grade indoor cameras, you can opt between static and rotating cameras, both of which have pros and cons. Check out our article here.

5. Prevent access via your garage

An often-overlooked area to protect is your garage. Even if a burglar is not able to access your home from the garage, you most likely have some goodies stored in there that will make the trip worth it for most burglars, such as power tools.

If there is access into your home from the garage, the burglar will have a quiet, secluded place to work on gaining access into your house. You should consider adding a motion detector, at the least, or an indoor security camera to help catch intruders in the act and to deter them from remaining.

Always lock all access points into the garage and avoid keeping any automated garage door opening remotes in your car, where they can easily be stolen.

6. Keep your Wi-Fi system protected

Your wireless network is the backbone of modern consumer security systems, thanks to the convenient connectivity it provides, but this does risk giving criminals potential backdoor access if your network is not properly secured.

Ensure that your Wi-Fi is set up to use WPA2 encryption. Anything less what WPA2 (ie, WEP or WPA) will not offer you the level of security you expect. WEP in particular is problematic and if your router won’t allow anything else, replace it immediately.

You should make sure your access password is strong and private. If your Wi-Fi has been present for a while, consider renaming the Wi-Fi (this will result in your devices needing to be reconnected) and hide your network by selecting the appropriate option in your router, often labelled ‘Hide Wi-Fi’ or ‘Broadcast SSID’.

7. Use Home Automation

Let’s be honest. If you’re planning to set up a wireless home security system, you’re planning to include a few Google Nest or Alexa devices. Everyone does! And that’s great because it allows home automation options, which in turn can be used to boost your home security.

Home automation can be used to schedule devices in your home to turn on or off, such as lights. Turning lights on and off through the day can give the impression of an occupied property, even when you’re all out at work or on holiday.

Alerts can deliver automated messages via two-way audio can help deter thefts from your front door, and let people know that they are being recorded. Notifications to your phone will also let you know they are there, giving you the chance to ask those delivery drivers to wait a moment while you get to the door – great for slower older residents.

Conclusion

The great thing about modern Wi-Fi options, in combination with home automation, is that with just a few devices and some imagination, it’s possible to personalise the way your home works for you in ways never before achievable and bring home security directly under your control.

Posted on 25th Aug 2021 by ebizadmin