Creating Halloween Security for Your Home

The last couple weeks have brought us a sharp increase in hanging skeletons, candy sales, and colder weather. All of these indicate the arrival of the Halloween “spooky season” in all its glory. As we get ready to indulge in trick-or-treating, seasonal parties, and scary movies, we should also pay attention to some of the security risks that the season brings. We always help our customers add security that fits both their unique security needs as well as any seasonal security threats that pop up during the year. In today’s post, we aim to provide some assistance with your efforts in creating Halloween security for your home!

First, we’ll share some best practices to help you prevent your home from falling victim to pranksters this Halloween. Whether fairly innocuous or overtly destructive, these “tricks” are something all homeowners wish to avoid. From there, we’ll provide some ideas to help add visibility to your home in your absence. This can also help you avoid pranks, as well as more serious crimes such as burglaries. Following these tips should take top priority on a day when most families in their home will leave their lights on. Then, we’ll move on to detail some ways to add surveillance to your home. Specifically, we’ll show you how installing both video doorbells and exterior surveillance cameras can aid in creating Halloween security. Now, let’s dive in with a look at some proactive ways you can avoid Halloween hijinks this year.

Getting Proactive About Preventing Pranks

Taking simple steps to make your home a less attractive target can go a long way in avoiding pranks. For example, keep your car in your garage rather than the driveway or street on Halloween if at all possible. Many people walk around the neighborhood on Halloween, making it easier than usual for someone to key your car without detection. Clean up any heavy or potentially damaging decorations when you go to bed. Pumpkins make especially popular items to smash or even to throw through windows.

Also consider removing decorations that troublemakers may want to vandalize, or at least keep them as close to the house as possible. While some Halloween-related pranks do more damage than others, making it as hard as possible for others to victimize your home creates the greatest amount of Halloween security. Now, let’s look at another “best practice” that can assist you with creating Halloween security for your home.

Making Your Home and Yard Visible Even if You Celebrate Halloween Elsewhere

You may remember our recent Tips for Better Vacation Home Security. In that post, we discussed the importance of “maintaining appearances” for your vacation home’s exterior in your absence. After all, a home that is clearly vacant makes a much more likely target for burglary. On Halloween night, the same concept holds true. Many homeowners keep their lights on to indicate a good stop for trick-or-treaters. Conversely, turning the lights off acts as a signal to let families know the house is empty.

While it may result in a few trick-or-treating families ringing your doorbell for naught, keeping the exterior of your home well-lit can make it less obvious that your home is empty on Halloween, and thus make you a less obvious target for a prankster, vandal, or burglar. Additionally, keeping exterior lights on also allows passersby to see your doors and yard. On a night when a dark home clearly indicates an empty home, houses without lighting can turn into low-hanging fruit for troublemakers. We recommend taking steps to keep your entire yard visible on Halloween, even if you celebrate elsewhere. Next up, let’s take a look at two different types of surveillance equipment to help with creating Halloween security for your home’s exterior.

Securing Your Perimeter Doors with Doorbell Cameras

Over the past few years, doorbell cameras have gotten very popular very quickly. Our preferred doorbell camera comes packed with customizable security settings to add security to your own doors. If you have a security system monitored through our cellular dialer powered by Alarm.com, we can add a doorbell that interacts with your alarm quite easily. The Alarm.com cellular dialer already gives users the ability to arm and disarm their security systems remotely with a smartphone or tablet. Adding an Alarm.com doorbell camera also provides a video notification if someone rings the doorbell. At this point, you can engage in a conversation with the visitor. This comes in especially handy if the doorbell rings when you don’t expect visitors, or if the doorbell rings later at night than usual on Halloween and you want to view your late trick-or-treaters before opening the door.

Additionally, doorbell cameras allow you to view them remotely at any time. If your doorbell cameras sense motion, they will even capture and store a video for your later viewing. Furthermore, you can create a notification that alerts you immediately when these cameras sense motion. The ability to track activity around your doors make these an extremely popular way for homeowners to add Halloween security. Let’s look at another option to create video security to your home’s exterior.

Utilizing Exterior Home Surveillance Cameras for Complete-Property Security

In addition to securing your entrances, we also encourage customers to install equipment to help secure their entire property. Many of our customers install exterior cameras to watch over their driveway, lawns, sheds and garages, and any other areas of interest. Many customers install Alarm.com Smart Cameras around their home. This provides them with the ability to set up the same types of alerts afforded by the Alarm.com doorbell camera. They also provide a relatively low price point compared with hardwired camera systems. However, hardwired surveillance systems also offer benefits of their own. Let’s take a closer look at this type of system to provide a comparison.

We often install high-quality, hardwired surveillance systems for homeowners. We install these cameras with a recorder that records video 24 hours a day. While we can connect these surveillance systems to your home network, they still operate independently from it. This means that glitches in your network will not affect a camera’s ability to capture video. For this reason, customers with the need for the most consistent surveillance available often go this route.

Additionally, the cameras included on this system tend to have a higher resolution than their Wifi-based counterparts. This allows users to get a closer view of what happens in front of their cameras. Of course, the additional recording equipment, installation of camera wiring, and higher-end cameras also make this option the more expensive of the two. We can always act as a resource for those looking to make a decision on their own home surveillance equipment. Now, let’s look at making sure that you keep the exterior of your house bright and uninviting to troublemakers on Halloween.

Putting it All Together and Creating Halloween Security for Your Home

We hope that this post helps you with creating Halloween security for your home. Moreover, we also encourage you to contact us with any questions this post may raise for you. We will happily answer any and all of your security-related inquiries. Additionally, we also encourage you to take advantage of our free site survey program. We offer complimentary security audits and equipment quotes to both new and existing customers alike.

During our visit, we can discuss solutions for your existing security concerns. Furthermore, we can also make suggestions of our own based on observations of your property that we make while onsite. Over our 36-plus years in business, we’ve helped over a thousand homeowners secure their own homes with solutions that fit their security needs, their budgets, and their desired security experience. Together, we can create a complete security plan to keep your home, your valuables, and your family as safe and secure as possible during this Halloween season and all year round!