Burglary Protection

While there is probably no greater protection for your home and no greater prevention and deterrence of burglary than a state-of-the-art security system, there are many steps you can take to help defend your home against burglaries. For your convenience we have listed the following helpful suggestions for you:

Use of Alarm Accessories to prevent burglaries

• Security One provides you with accessories that can function as very useful devices to prevent burglaries including Alarm signs and decals. The sight of these signs and decals can assist in discouraging intruders from even contemplating breaking into your home.
• Making certain to keep all of the entrances to your home in “stay” mode when you are in the house and in the “away” mode when no one is in the house is another helpful prevention technique.

Prevention measures to take if you are leaving for vacation

It is well known that many homes are burglarized when the owners are on vacation. This situation can be minimized if you take the following helpful steps to reduce the appearance that you are away or on vacation:

• Contact your post office and newspaper delivery persons to suspend the delivery of your mail and newspapers.
• Be certain that your home is well lit both on the interior and exterior. You can accomplish this easily with the use of light timers which are programmed for various times of the day so that your home will always be well lit.
• To avoid the appearance of an empty driveway, ask some of your neighbors to alternate parking their vehicles in your driveway.
• Just as you do not want to alert potential burglars that you are away from home by leaving visual signals, you also do not want to leave verbal signals, so it is important that you avoid leaving messages on your phone answering machine that might reveal the fact that you are away from home.
• Do not use obvious places to hide your house keys such as a mailbox, planter or under a mat as this would be an obvious place for an intruder to look for house keys.
• Another measure which will help reduce the appearance that you are away is if you perform some yard work before you go away so that it will look as though you have been at home recently. If a home looks as though it is in need of yard work, it may convey the impression that you have been away.

Reducing False Alarms

False alarms cause many problems not just for you but also for the community at large. There is no question that for you, false alarms can result in expensive false alarm fees that can cost hundreds of dollars. This alone is very upsetting, but false alarms also create a large burden on the limited resources of the emergency service responders such as the police department, fire department, etc. as they spend unnecessary time responding to alarm reports that ultimately turn out to be false. Here are some helpful suggestions that you can take to reduce false alarms:

• Please remember to inform the Central Station of all new pass codes and arming codes, and new or removed authorized users. This will be extremely helpful in reducing/eliminating false alarms.
• Train the less frequent users on how to use the system. For example, remember to properly train babysitters, relatives, children, and other visitors to the home.
• Set up a regular schedule with reminders to service and maintain your system (including the replacement of batteries). This will greatly assist in reducing false alarms.
• Be certain to secure your doors and windows before you turn on your alarm.
• Keep a user friendly instruction sheet for the operation of the system in a place that is easy to find.
• Report any system malfunctions to Security One in a timely manner.
• Test your alarm system on a monthly basis to insure that it is functioning properly.