Securing Your Basement Effectively

As we point out in our post on Defeating Smart Criminals, part of our job involves attempting to think like a burglar. Doing so allows us to make our customers’ homes as secure as possible. 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’ll show you how we can aid your efforts in securing your basement efficiently.

First, we’ll review some ways that you can make your basement an unattractive break-in location. Some best practices in this area can greatly reduce the burglary threat posed by unattended basements. Then, we’ll discuss adding effective locks to your basement doors and windows. Unfortunately, basement doors and windows often receive cursory treatment when it comes to this important facet of security. From there, we’ll discuss some alarm-related equipment we can install to catch thieves in the act if they do decide to target your basement. Finally, we’ll share another alarm-related tip in the form of adding valuable life safety and environmental security to your basement. Now, let’s dive in with a looking at making your basement less attractive to thieves.

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.

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 a couple tips for securing your basement that our alarm customers can take advantage of.

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 securing your basement through the use of life safety and environmental alarm sensors.

Add Security Through Monitored Fire and Environmental Detection

At Northeast Security Solutions, we consider monitored security against smoke, heat, carbon monoxide, and environmental emergencies among the most important security that money can buy. We regularly install smoke, heat, and carbon monoxide (or “CO”) detectors when we install an alarm system. Ideally, we install this security during a home’s construction. This allows us to create a complete hardwired system in all of a home’s required locations for this equipment. You may remember our post sharing Residential Smoke Alarm Requirements in Massachusetts. In that post, we shared the legal requirements for smoke, heat, and CO detection in homes in this state. If we can install this equipment before you put your walls up, it provides the easiest access for us to create a full system comprised of monitored detectors. However, we can still install wireless devices after your home’s construction as well.

Additionally, we can install devices to monitor against weather-related emergencies. These sensors, called “environmental sensors,” detect events such as floods and extreme temperatures due to frozen pipes or malfunctioning HVAC equipment. The ability to detect these events before they turn in to a disaster can greatly enhance your holiday travel security. Additionally, we often surprise customers withe how easily we can add this security. For example, the pictured wireless sensor detects both water and extreme temperatures! The simplicity of adding this security, as well as the huge potential savings of cost and effort that they create if they do catch an event before it turns into a disaster, make these sensors a popular addition to any alarm panel.

Putting it All Together and Securing Your Basement

We hope that this post helps you see how we can help you with securing your basement. 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 on up!