More Places to Blog About Home Security

I found another blog about home security alarm systems. It has some great posts about wireless security cameras, monitored alarm systems and other home security related items.

Check it out!

Making your home burglar resistant

Home security is a huge concern these days, given the increasingly unsafe environment we live in. The fact is, there are a number of easy, practical steps you can take to minimize the chances of your home being burglarized.

Read making your home burglar resistant here.

Prepare for the worst

. . . and hope for the best.

What great advice! Do you have a home security alarm system? Is it a monitored alarm system? Having both is preparing for the worst. So is doing all the other things that deter burglaries. You can get more home alarm information here.

• Consider installing motion sensor lighting, so movements outside your home during the dark hours is met with light.
• Cut back your trees and shrubs, so there is no place to hide while trying to jimmy a lock or break a window
• Join your neighborhood watch, and become an active participant in helping your neighbors be burglary free
• Add a UPS to your alarm system so a power outage doesn't leave you vulnerable
• Use a cell phone line to call the monitoring company instead of your land-line, reducing the chance the burglar can cut the line and get in without being noticed or reported.

Prepare for the worst - then you are ready for whatever they throw at you.

Vacations and Home Safety

Will your house be safe and secure while you are gone on summer vacation?

• Stop mail and newspaper deliveries
• Set up a light on a timer
• Notify your local homeowner security group that you will be gone
• Back up your computer and take the backup and jewelry to the safety deposit box
• Install a home alarm system
• Consider a monitored home security alarm system
• Give a neighbor a key and have them check on the house periodically

You deserve to have some peace of mind. Enjoy your vacation, and leave the home security solution to us.

Roll Your Own Home Survelliance

In light of recent events, we thought it might be a good idea to show you how to whip up a low-cost home surveillance system. Not only is this system useful for nabbing burglars, but it can also be used to check in on your pets (warm-blooded or robotic), or merely to provide some added piece of mind that house and home are still standing.

With almost any generic webcam and some relatively cheap software, you can set up a motion-detecting security camera, a periodically refreshed image of your home interior/exterior, or even a live video feed direct from the excitement of your empty living room. You never know who you might catch in there someday.

Ingredients
This is what you’ll need to launch your own personal branch of the Department of Homestead Security:

Mac or PC. We’re using a laptop for our setup but you can really use anything. Once you’ve set it up, it can run headlessly and save some space. Computers with small form factors would work beautifully in this regard (hint, hint).
Webcam. On the Mac side, any Quicktime-compatible camera will do. On the Windows side, it’s also hard to go wrong. If you’ve got an old webcam lying around, it should be fine. Let’s dive in!

Home security camera: PC
If you haven’t already installed the drivers for your webcam, you’ll need to do that first. Then, download TinCam and install the software. You have 30 days to try it out and see if you want to fork over the $19.

Launch TinCam, and it will start walking you through a setup wizard. Because the wizard isn’t quite as bright as we are, you can just hit Cancel and we’ll handle making our settings manually.

Choose “Setup…” from the Setup menu. Click the “Video Devices” option in the menu at left, and check the box beside the webcam you’re using to select it:

Next, click the Auto Capture item:

Choose the “Motion detection” radio button, and in the Actions pane check the “Save picture to log directory” and “Send an e-mail” boxes. This will both save a local copy and email to you an image of the intruder, or perhaps a lovely shot of your intruding Great Dane. You can optionally have TinCam play a sound to scare off those pesky burglars; just check the “Play a sound” checkbox and Browse to find an audio file to launch upon sensor trigger. We highly recommend System of a Down for maximum impact, but it’s up to you. Just don’t choose Brahms.

Next, click on the File Names menu selection.

Here you define where you want your images to be stored. You can base the file naming on sequential number of on the time they’re snapped; the timestamp option will come in handy for our security setup. Click the Browse button beside the Log Directory text field and select where your webcam images will get stored.

Next, click E-mail in the Auto Capture submenu:

Enter the email address you wish to send to; the from address doesn’t really matter as long as it’s a valid address. Name it anything you want, just be creative. Don’t disappoint us.

Check “Attach picture to email.” You can also turn on flood control to make sure you don’t get 187 images of your cat sitting on your keyboard delivered to your inbox. Just pick whatever number seems reasonable to you. In the SMTP section at the bottom of the pane, enter the details for your mail server. If it requires authentication, check the box and enter your username and password.

Next, let’s define our motion sensor. Click on the Motion Detection option in the Auto Capture submenu. Click the define area button to call up the view from your webcam and define the area you wish to monitor (you can also use the entire viewable area by checking the “Use entire image” checkbox).

Just click and drag to create a red square that defines the sensor area.

From the Motion Detection pane you can also calibrate the sensitivity of the sensor. If you find your trigger is too trigger-happy and gets set off by your houseplants, just adjust the sensitivity by unchecking the Auto-calibrate box and using the slider.

You could also configure TinCam to upload images via FTP, if you have access to a web server and wish to have your images automagically uploaded and made viewable via a web browser. There is also a built-in image server, so you can host and serve the images locally. They’ll be accessible via browser from elsewhere in the house without much fuss, but if you want to log in to your home cam from work or elsewhere you’ll have to deal with converting what is likely a dynamic IP address (if you’re on a broadband connection) to a static IP address that a DNS server can find. TinCam offers a bit of a workaround in this regard so that you can upload a small text file that contains your dynamic IP, which you can use to create a dynamic link to your images from behind your home firewall. This is beyond the scope of this how-to, but with some fiddling you could make this a killer dorky addition to your web site. ;) You can also accomplish this by taking advantage of the excellent and free Dyndns.org service.

TinCam also technically offers a live video streaming option, but in practice it’s pretty much crap. The developers of TinCam are pretty up front about this and go out of their way to warn you that you’ll more than likely only have luck getting it to work when viewed from a Windows machine running Internet Explorer, and even then, only if the wind is coming up from the south and the moon is just shy of full. But go nuts with it - YMMV. You can simulate a video stream by uploading to your FTP server at a very high refresh rate. You won’t get an audio feed, but you’ll get something that approximates a live video feed, and it will actually be viewable in a browser that is not Evil.

Without further ado, we’re ready to test our system. Click the OK button to exit the setup window. All you need do to arm your cam is choose Auto Capture from the Capture menu. Then, quietly steal from the room and burgle your way back in to test out your cam. Make sure to trigger the area you’ve defined as your sensor area, then check your email to make sure your settings are all correct. We’re extremely embarassed to have caught ourselves in the act of stealing our own monitor:

Lucky thing we had our trusty webcam security system in place, as we were able to settle out of court and win enough in damages to get a nice, flat-panel LCD. W00t!

Wrap up
So here we’ve been introduced to the basic ingredients required to set up a home security system. Both Evocam and TinCam include multi-camera functionality, so you could use them to monitor multiple locations in and around your abode. You could extend the system in other ways as well; use a live home network video feed as a baby monitor, or perhaps do something a bit more humanitarian like taking your system mobile and keeping an eye on Paris Hilton’s Sidekick. Somebody’s got to do it.

OR, alternatively, you can just get a good monitored alarm security system from a reputable vendor, like ADT, Brinks or Protect America.

Burglar Secrets they don't want you to know

If you were locked out of your house, would you still be able to get in? Then so could a burglar.

One out of 10 homes will be burglarized this year, according to the National Crime Prevention Council, and many of the burglars are professionals, so you can never be too safe.

However, many intruders will spend no longer than 60 seconds trying to break into a home, so good locks and good neighbors who watch out for each other – can be big deterrents to burglars, according to the council. That’s what neighborhood watches are all about.

Here are some simple safety tips to help keep your home and family protected:

• Never hide a key outside. Instead, give a spare key to a trusting neighbor.
• 80 percent of break-ins are through a door. Doors visible to the street and neighbors are much safer.
• Get new locks installed when you move into a new house. Dead bolts are best. They are not vulnerable to being jimmied. Make sure they have at least a 1-inch draw into the door jam.
• Make sure your door has a wide-angle peephole – if not, have one installed.
• Solid core and metal doors are the hardest to break into.
• Sliding doors can be easy prey for burglars. Place a broomstick on the track behind the sliding door.
• Pins are a safe way to secure doors and windows. They can be purchased at almost any hardware store. This does require a little work on your part though, to drill hoels where the pins are placed when the window or door is secured. A side benefit of using pins is that you can set a window open an inch or two, for air flow ,and still use the pins to secure it.
• Don’t leave a ladder, or anything that helps provide access to a roof or second story window outside your home.
• Keep outside lights on at night, or have lights that come on when a motion sensor is tripped.
  When staying away from home, don’t leave lights on all day and night. This signals an empty home. Having light timers installed can be a good way to scare burglars off. You can buy simple electrical timers at your hardware store, and install them yourself.
• When going on a vacation, don’t let mail pile up. Ask a friend or neighbor to pick it up for you or, bet yet, ask the post office to hold mail until you return. Don’t forget your daily or weekly paper delivery, and any other deliveries, like milk, etc.
• Don’t leave answering machine messages indicating that you will not be home.
• Having your yard and driveway kept up while you are gone is also a good way to pretend you are home.

If you get home and things look suspicious (torn screen, door open etc.) Do not enter your home. Call the police from a neighbor’s house.
Have a monitored home security alarm system installed in your home. You can find a good home alarm system here.

Lighting Deters Burglars while Improving Property's Looks

Many experts agree that a few lights strategically placed could be your pass to protection when it comes to burglary.

"Using a light plan that is very strategic, not one that floods areas with light, you can achieve the two benefits of safety and security, as well as creating an aesthetically pleasing environment," said Denise Champagne of Osram Sylvania/Siemens.

That means your house can both look great -- and deter thieves -- with some simple low-tech, low cost solutions. Place pathway lights on the edges of your walkway. Use up-lights around shrubbery or jungle gyms to highlight landscape and minimize hiding places. Position a floodlight or two toward your house. It'll give your home a warm glow while deterring undesirables from your home's perimeter. Police say lights with motion detectors are another great deterrent, especially when homeowners are away.

"Hopefully a neighbor would see a light turn on, look out the window and see a suspicious person in the driveway and in turn call the police," said Sgt. George Marshall of the New Rochelle, N.Y., Police Department. "In addition, a burglar might turn away because of the light. Dark is a burglar's best friend."

Low-voltage lights and energy-efficient fluorescents and halogens may be the wallet's best friend.

"There have been so many advancements in lighting technologies in recent years that consumers can achieve good lighting plans and not sacrifice energy efficiency and the cost of running those bulbs," Champagne said.

Law enforcement experts agree that "running those bulbs" with timers can go a long way in deterring break-ins while you're away. With today's energy efficient light bulbs, you don't have to burn a hole in your pocket while lighting the outside.

Neighborhood Watch Programs increase Home Safety

Are you a participant in your neighborhood watch group, where neighbors and citizens act as the eyes and ears of the police or sheriff’s office?

“As a law enforcement community, we’re starting to realize we can only be effective to a certain point without the help of the community,” said Sgt. Bill Norman, who coordinates a local sheriff’s neighborhood watch programs.

When the public learns what it can do to protect itself from crime and participates, Norman said, “the results are far beyond what law enforcement can do by itself.”

If you don’t already have a neighborhood watch system, discuss the program with the local police or sheriff’s office. You can also reduce crime even more by installing better lighting around the outside of your home.

To be effective, a neighborhood watch program needs participants. Solicit help from neighbors, and find a dedicated group within the watch program to patrol the neighborhood at various times or the day and night.

“With people walking the neighborhood and making their presence known, you just don’t see it anymore,” Norman said of criminal activity. The single biggest problem now is youth loitering.

Norman went on to say that neighborhood watches don’t need people patrolling neighborhoods to be successful. Instead, they can learn from the police or sheriff’s office how to look for suspicious activity they might see in normal routines and when to call the local authorities.

Additionally, you can learn to inspect their own homes and make them a less inviting target for crime by improving lighting, trimming shrubs and installing better locks or hardware for doors and windows. There are also other ways to secure your home and yard.

Even if local authorities can’t act on problems right away, bringing it to their attention can lead to solutions later.

Once you have established a core group, you can apply to local authorities for signage to place in your neighborhood. Thieves and burglars go where the prey is an easy target, so advertise that you have a watch program, and watch the bad guys go somewhere else!

And of course, one way to keep the burgalrs at bay is to install a monitored home security system.

Save money on home owner insurance

Did you know you can save money on your home owner insurance if you have a monitored home security system? That's right - according to a study by the national insurance association, If you had a monitored home security burglar alarm system, you may qualify for a lower rate on your homeowners insurance. You can read more about it here: homeowners insurance reduction for monitored alarm system.

Welcome to Home Alarm Info

Here we are, setting up our first blog to share our home alarm information with the world. Look for articles and news about home security alarm systems from Home Alarm Info, or go directly to their blog.