As we pointed out in last week’s post on Security Equipment for Your Car and Driveway, we take a whole-home approach when working with customers to create their security plans. Naturally, many people focus on securing the areas of their home with the most valuables. Home studios, bedrooms, and offices often get special attention for this reason. However, we always want to spend extra attention securing your home’s most vulnerable entry points as well. After all, keeping the wrong people out of your home entirely will ultimately secure your valuables in other areas of your home. In particular, we find that basements often get the least amount of attention during security planning. This week, we want to help address this important area of your home. Today, we share some valuable tips for creating effective basement security.
First, we’ll review some basic tips to help minimize your basement’s attractiveness to thieves. Since burglars usually scout their targets out in advance, following these tips can help keep you off of their “hit lists” entirely. Then, we’ll share some tips for making it as hard as possible to enter your basement at all. Finally, we’ll detail some security system-related equipment to add basement security. This section will include a look at devices to help stop a burglary in its tracks, as well as some equipment to help you catch weather-related emergencies that start in your basement before they turn into whole-home issues! Now, let’s dive in and see how you can make your basement uninviting to the wrong “visitors.”
Making Your Basement Less Attractive to Prospecting Criminals
Keeping a well-groomed and well-lit yard shows up as a general security tip in our post on Yard and Driveway Security. This security tip does not just apply to keeping first-floor windows visible. Basement windows obscured by shrubbery, long grass, or located behind a fence can also compromise your basement security. We recommend making basement windows visible from all parts of your yard. You can start by keeping grass and shrubbery around these windows short and well-groomed. If you have basement windows in a garden and cannot avoid obscuring these windows, consider planting thorn-bearing bushes near the windows to make them less attractive to approach.
Allowing shrubbery to cover your basement windows could make them a potential target for burglars.
Adding lighting around basement windows and bulkhead doors can also scare off would-be thieves who do not wish to be seen. You can install permanent exterior lighting if desired. If this option seems drastic, you can consider motion-based lighting or garden lights installed on the ground. Whatever your method, the level of threat provided by your basement windows decreases as the level of visibility increases. Taking steps to make your basement less attractive at first glance will help add basement security. In addition, let’s also look at some ways to make forcible entry into your basement more difficult. Next up, let’s take a look at some tips for making your basement as difficult as possible to breach.
Locking Your Basement Up
Not many people open their basement doors and windows regularly. For this reason, many homeowners do not give much thought to the basement doors and windows that they install. In particular, we recommend taking care to secure the door at the bottom of your bulkhead stairway. Many people do not install a deadbolt or sturdy locking equipment on this door. Burglars know this, and many of them choose to break into a bulkhead and work in the relative privacy of a basement staircase to get inside their victims’ homes. We recommend following our Door Security Tips for these doors, even if you never plan using your own basement door. Many homeowners also install basement door security bars for extra security.
Additionally, you have several options to help secure your basement windows. Unfortunately, modern basement windows generally come with cheap locks and easy-to-break plastic frames. Installing new window locks and basement window security bars make these windows much less enticing to criminals. Window covers and security films also create a low-cost deterrent. Remember, doors and windows that you consider “out of sight, out of mind” are the very places that burglars gravitate towards. In addition to making a basement more difficult to enter, the added threat of a police response to a break-in attempt goes a long way towards thwarting burglary attempts. Let’s take a look at how we address basement security for our alarm customers.
Burglary-Related Alarm Equipment
When designing a security system, homeowners often attempt to add additional equipment where they store their valuables. Of course, we always recommend thinking about what’s most important to you first. However, your valuables have a better chance of surviving a burglary if a siren sounds the moment the break-in occurs. Once your valuables are within sight of a criminal, a motion detector activating an alarm will not save them. For this reason, we recommend securing your basement entry points to ensure an immediate alarm response. We have a few options for adding alarm coverage for your basement.
Installing motion detectors can provide the most efficient coverage for basement windows. If you have an open basement, one motion detector can often provide an almost instant alert to a basement intruder. Adding basement barrier bars (pictured) provides an even greater level of security. We install these contacts across the middle of your basement window, making it impossible for an intruder to enter without bumping the barrier bar and activating the security system. Now, let’s turn our attention to adding basement security through the use of environmental alarm sensors.
Connecting Environmental Sensors to Your Burglar Alarm
Basement barrier bars, such as this one by Interlogix, activate your security system if someone climbs through a basement window.
Most alarm customers think of their security system as a tool to lower the risks posed by break-ins and fires. Obviously, these threats deserve addressing when we design any alarm system. However, we surprise many people by offering alarm sensors that offer security above and beyond burglary and life safety equipment. We also offer sensors that create alerts for environmental disasters that have the potential to cause a home major damage. Since most weather-related emergencies begin in your basement, adding this equipment marks a perfect way for you to go about creating effective basement security.
For example, our “hi-lo temperature” detectors can create a central station response if your home experiences dangerously hot or cold conditions. This can help alert you to frozen pipes or HVAC equipment failures. Additionally, we offer flood sensors that can detect the presence of water wherever we install them.
As an added bonus, some of our alarm manufacturers even create sensors that detect both extremely cold temperatures and the presence of water! These contacts provide a huge amount of environmental security in one compact piece of equipment. Finding out about weather-related emergencies as soon as they occur can help you minimize the cost and effort that would go into cleaning up a potential catastrophe.
Putting it All Together and Creating Effective Basement Security
We hope that this post helps you see how we can help you with creating effective basement security. Additionally, we encourage you to contact us with any questions you may have about the material presented here. We will happily answer any and all of your security-related inquiries. Furthermore, we also invite you to take advantage of our free site survey program. We offer complimentary security audits and equipment quoted to both new and existing customers alike. While on site, we can help you tackle all of your existing security concerns. Moreover, we can also make suggestions of our own based on observations we make during our visit. Together, we can create a plan to keep your entire home as safe and secure as possible, from the basement up!