Preventing Home Break-ins: How to Secure Your Home

Prevention of home break-ins becomes more and more urgent problem every year. A reliable front door undoubtedly will become a serious barrier to the violators. However, it is worth taking care of additional measures to ensure the safety of your home.

Safe house layout

To ensure maximum security at home, you should carefully consider the layout of the house and the surrounding area. The safest form of the building is rectangular or square, as they are easily viewed from different sides. The presence of nooks and projections allows malefactors to hide behind them. High branchy trees also represent a danger. It is desirable to trim the long branches of trees, so that the attacker cannot climb into the house.

It is more difficult to find an intruder in a house with a large number of rooms. Therefore, experts advise installing infrared sensors and other electronic protective equipment to improve safety. In addition, you can design a panic room where you can hide until the police arrive.

Proper layout and placement of windows also helps to achieve increased home security. One of the windows should provide a field of view of the entrance zone and the backyard.

Basic tips to protect home from burglary

Remember that any security system, mechanical or electronic, can be broken into. The main issue is how long it takes an attacker to neutralize the security system and enter the house. To ensure the best possible safety at home, you need to determine how the offender can enter the premises. The vast majority of such ways are doors and windows.

A separate point is the territory adjacent to the house. It is advisable to use fences to protect this area. It should be installed along the perimeter of the entire adjoining territory.

 

Secure front doors for homes

Even if an intruder could penetrate the adjacent territory, he would have to enter the house through the door. So it is necessary to install highly reliable models. The quality front doors for homes should have a solid construction without external welds. The leaf should be made of upscale materials (predominantly steel) and equipped with reliable sound and heat insulation systems. Locks with mechanism of different types provide an enhanced security system, since the offender will need more time to break into various mechanisms. The built-in peephole with a wide viewing angle (180–210°) makes it possible to see what is happening behind the door. You can see the visitor even if he/she has moved aside. 

Protection of windows

Windows are the second weak point of any house. In order to prevent home break-ins, the windows must be constructed of durable and high-quality materials. Wood, aluminum, metal, fiberglass or composite materials are used for the production of frames. Insulated window glazing (windows with two or more panes of glass) is often used. The most popular option is double-glazed pane (also known as thermal or insulating glass (IG)). They effectively increase home’s energy efficiency and have good sound insulation.

Sometimes special films are used to strengthen the glass. They are glued from inside the double-glazed pane and hold the shards when you try to break the glass. Thanks to such a film, glass is almost impossible to break.

You can additionally protect the window by installing metal grilles. The method of their manufacture practically does not influence durability — the main thing that the thickness of rods should be 0.4–0.47 inches.

… and not only

When choosing a window or door, do not focus only on the product itself. Experts recommend paying attention to window and door openings, the strength of the walls and the reliability of the placement of the doorframe. This allows achieving the highest protective characteristics of a house.

How else to secure a house or apartment?

Specialist recommend following simple rules to protect home from intruders and keep valuables safe:

• do not leave the door to the house, apartment or porch open;
• do not let strangers in;
• install video door phone;
• if you lose keys, change the locks immediately;
• all windows and doors must be firmly closed when leaving the house;
• pull the curtains (especially at nightfall) — the criminals can see what is happening inside the home;
• an additional bonus to housing security is good relations with neighbors.

It is also important to tell the children the simple rules — do not open the door to strangers and do not answer their questions. Do not tell babies and kids where valuable things are stored.

And for even more safety of the home, it is recommended to use burglar alarms or security cameras.

In addition, you can use property insurance.