Creating Summer Security

As we prepare to celebrate Independence Day, we’ve officially entered the heart of summer. We’ve begun to welcome warmer weather and longer days, as well as the advent of school vacations. However, these seasonal perks also bring about their own security concerns. The same positive attributes we’ve mentioned also leads to an increase in break-in attempts during this season. After all, burglars can find more comfortable conditions and more empty homes during this time of year. Moreover, summer weather can also lead to unexpected emergencies at your home as well. For these reasons, we recommend taking extra security cautions during this time of year. In this post, we share some tips to help you with creating summer security.

First, we’ll look at a couple ways you can brace yourself for security-related concerns. Specifically, we’ll help you make sure that you can spot potential crime at your home. From there, we’ll also see how you can prepare yourself for potential all-day trips and vacations. At this point, we’ll turn our attention to non-crime related security risks. This will include a look at both environmental sensors as well as ways to receive alerts about and even remotely control your HVAC equipment. Now, let’s dive in with some ways you can defeat the security challenges presented over the summer.

Preparing for Peak Crime Season

A few years back, our local NBC affiliate published this report on the rise of crime in the summertime. Citing the U.S. Department of Justice, the article claims that your chances of experiencing a break-in increases more than 25% during this time of year. As we mentioned, the warmer weather and arrival of peak vacation season add to this danger each year. In this section, we’ll share a couple powerful approaches you can take to help thwart this threat. Let’s begin by checking out a couple types of cameras you can add to help solve — and even prevent — any crime this year.

Keeping Eyes on Your Property

While burglar alarms do a great job scaring thieves away from your property and calling out for help, they almost never point to the solution of a crime. Moreover, security systems certainly never lead to you catching a potential crime before it even happens! After all, these systems require detecting a breach in order to activate. However, cameras can help both cause and prevent crimes. Installing cameras allows you to watch footage of anything that happens on your property both in real time and after the fact. Moreover, it also adds an element of valuable crime prevention as well. After all, many criminals seeing a visisible surveillance presence will find a new target.

For these reasons, we recommend that our customers add some form of video security to their property. We have many options to do so, including traditional hardwired systems, wifi-based smart cameras, and even video doorbells! Adding one (or more) of these types of security greatly increases your home’s overall security. This rings especially true during vacations or other absences from your home. Speaking of which, let’s now turn our attention to securing your home during these events.

Getting Ready for Extended Absences

As we’ve mentioned, summer provides the year’s biggest opportunities for you and the family to get away. Whether you take a day trip to catch a sporting event or take a week away to visit the beach, these excursions create opportunities for thieves to break into your empty home without the threat of confrontation. For this reason, we suggest taking some common-sense measures while away from your home. For example, we highly recommend waiting until your return to post pictures of your trips on social media. This keeps you from advertising an empty home to “friends of friends.” Taking steps such as holding your mail and setting up a house sitter also work wonders during extended absences.

In addition to common-sense best practices, we also offer security equipment for these instances. In addition to the smart cameras mentioned earlier, we also offer smart lights that can turn on and off either on a schedule or randomly to make your house look a little less empty. We also recommend using smart keypad locks, rather than keys, to grant access to house sitters. These locks allow you to remotely lock and unlock your home’s doors. Therefore, they allow you to let guests and/or contractors in without giving them a key or a code! In the next section, we’ll see how we can use your security system to help you prepare for extreme weather this summer.

Installing Equipment to Prepare for Extreme Weather

Along with warmer conditions, summer also brings the threat of occasional extreme weather. Both heat waves and rain storms bring their own unique threats to your home. Therefore, creating summer security must include preparing for these realities as well. Luckily, we offer ways to prepare for weather-related events both in the summer and all year round. In this section, we’ll focus on this equipment. Let’s begin our discussion with a focus on installing alarm sensors to detect and alert you to weather-related issues.

Using Environmental Sensors to Your Advantage

When it comes to threats that your home faces, Mother Nature presents quite a few ways to do damage in the summer. This rings especially true in New England, with its frequent stormy and wet weather during this time of year. Luckily, we have you covered! We surprise many people by offering sensors that can alert you to environmental disasters that have the potential to cause a home major damage. These sensors can help you detect and address these issues before they create a mess that takes a significant amount of time and money to repair.

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 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. Let’s now turn our attention to creating summer security by adding devices that provide even greater control over your home’s environment.

Adding Safeguards and Remote Access to Your Home’s HVAC Equipment

In addition to finding out about potential weather-related dangers, many of our customers also want these issues addressed in their absence. We have a couple ways to do that! For starters, we offer waterflow kits that both detect the presence of water AND shut your water off for you. These devices, such as the model pictured, provide the peace of mind that comes with knowing that the issue you’re receiving an alert about has already been addressed.

Furthermore, smart thermostats and temperature sensors give you the ability to remotely view the temperature in your home at all times. Moreover, they also let you control the temperature if you don’t like what you see. Our preferred smart environmental controls, powered by Alarm.com, put you in complete control. Now, you can create heating and cooling schedules and receive alerts anytime your home experiences unexpected temperatures anywhere on your property. The peace of mind, security, and energy savings these devices create make them one of our most powerful means of adding summer security.

Putting it all Together and Creating Summer Security for Your Family

We hope that this post helps you with creating summer security both this year and every year moving forward. Moreover, we invite you to contact us with any questions the material presented here 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 provide complimentary security audits and equipment quotes to both new and existing customers alike. While on site, we can address any security concerns you may have. Furthermore, we can also make suggestions of our own based on observations we make during our visit.

Perhaps you have some security in place now, but want to act on some of our seasonal security suggestions. Or, maybe you have very little security at the present time and wish to get started on the right foot. Either way, we are happy to help! We’ve worked with over a thousand customers to provide home security that meets the security demands of every season. Together, we can create a complete security plan to keep you, your most valuable possessions, and your family as safe and secure as possible!