As Winter Approaches min

As Winter Approaches

15/10/2021 by

First Contact

As winter approaches, we all start thinking of the darkness creeping in earlier and are often reminded of home/office security.  The truth is that 67% of burglaries occur in the UK during daylight hours.

In most cases a burglar wants an easy target, this means they don’t want to have to confront anyone, or deal with a range of deterrents.

The best ways to prevent a break in are as follows:

  • Make sure all accessible doors and windows are locked, in many cases you can lock a window in the vent position and still be secure while getting fresh air.
  • Look at your premises, start with your perimeter, if possible think of circles of protection.  At home your widest circle would be fencing and gates, if affordable and practical make sure you have good height fencing in place and if you have a side path use a solid lockable gate. You can beef up your fences and gates with some simple screw on fence spikes, these are very cheap and easy to DIY install, they make it harder for people to climb over the top. For more information click here.
  • Lighting is crucial, any dark areas around the premises should be well lit.  Many people use motion sensors to enable their flood lights, the theory behind these is that not only will you notice but neighbours may notice the light going on.  Personally I don’t feel that’s such an advantage, I prefer given the low running costs of LED lighting to have lights that come on automatically when it gets dark and stay on until daylight.  While LED floodlights are good for covering larger areas, such as car parks or very big driveways, for homes, I prefer downlighters that take standard LED GU10 bulbs, the higher you fit them the  further they spread, but remember that makes them harder to reach to change bulbs, so I would suggest don’t go above the height of your stepladders so you don’t need to call someone in to change the bulbs for you.  You can also install LED tape lights, these are normally about 5m long come on a roll and are self adhesive, they are more decorative, but make great accent lighting and really effective.  These can be fitted underneath soffits to act as downlights.  They are cheap to buy, just make sure you get external grade ones and are easy to fit, they just require low voltage power.
  • Every building should have an alarm, in many cases this can lower your insurance and is a great deterrent.  We offer a range of wireless smart alarms, so they can be installed with minimal mess or disruption, they are secure against hacking and can be controlled by a traditional keypad or an app on your phone. 
  • Any modern alarm should give you the option of being notified by either a SMS or notification via the app when it goes off.  Our system uses a sim card to do this as well as being connected to your router, this means it is future proof and you don’t have to pay monthly on going fees to an alarm monitoring company.  You can even have a choice of standard PIR motion sensors or ones with a camera built in that take snapshots and send them to you.
https://youtu.be/T4FisTDbZVU
  • Access control or door entry systems are very popular now.  About 7 years ago Ring brought out the first smart doorbell and disrupted the market, there are many similar products available now, many of them with pros and cons, but the underlying advantage is that it not only protects more vulnerable people from having to answer the door in person, but often burglar will knock on and give some excuse like offering to clean your gutters, this is often a ruse to see if anyone is in.  We offer a range of door entry products that work well for both home and work, but whatever product you decide to get remember always answer the door using the app rather than going in person when you are in, otherwise anyone watching your property will know when you are in and not.
  • CCTV is still an excellent deterrent, with massive improvements in recent years to the quality of recordings, as well as ease of remote viewing this also offers great peace of mind.  We offer a range of solutions that include advanced motion detection that can ignore things like cats, dogs and foxes but only alert or record key areas when detecting vehicles or people. You can even get full colour at night cameras as well, so your footage doesn’t have to look like a clip from an episode of crime-watch from the 80’s
  • Many people ask if getting a dog is a good deterrent.  If you would have asked me that a couple of years ago I would have answered yes, depending on the dog, but with a recent massive upsurge in dog thefts if anything it may attract trouble rather than prevent it.  If you do have dog, don’t worry, just be careful, try to walk it in busier areas or with someone else, even at home don’t leave it unattended outside even in the back garden and remove dog signs.

Remember preventing these sorts of incidents is mostly about ensuring your property is more secure than the other ones in your area or street, thieves will generally prefer to target somewhere with less deterrents if you can make it too much trouble for them they will look for an easier target.

If you want some free security advice or are considering a security solution for your home or office feel free to contact us on 0161 740 7400 or [email protected] and one of engineers will happily help you.