Securing Your Home Over Summer Vacation

Next week marks the last full week of school in Western Massachusetts. With it comes students’ anticipation of vacation travels, as well as long days spent at home watching television, swimming, and spending time with friends. As with any other season, of course, this time of year brings its own unique security concerns. Of course, family vacations mean empty homes. School vacation often means school-aged kids left at home all day while you are at work. Moreover, summer weather can also wreak havoc on your home during this time of year. Therefore, we always work hard to prepare our customers for these security threats and more. In today’s post, we’ll provide some valuable tips for securing your home over summer vacation!

First, we’ll discuss some best practices for preparing for extended absences for your home. This will provide a great foundation for the rest of the material in this post. From there, we’ll detail some alarm-related summer vacation security measures. Specifically, we’ll show you how our interactive alarm monitoring can help prepare you for the season. Then, we’ll show you some unique security equipment to power up your summer security. Theis will include adding security contacts to unconventional spots in your home. Taking this step allows you to receive instant alerts to track activity within your house. Finally, we’ll wrap up our post with by shifting our focus to our environmental sensor offerings. These sensors can alert you to weather-related security threats in your home. Now, let’s get started with a look at some best practices for preparing your home for an extended absence.

Preparing for Extended Absences from Your Home

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. More than anything else, burglars want to get in and out of their victims’ homes without any confrontation. This minimizes the chances of getting caught and even hurt or even killed by someone inside. Additionally, physical confrontations with residents can add additional criminal charges to the initial burglary. Therefore, burglars often look for signs of an empty home before committing a crime. An increasing pile of mail outside a home represents a popular telltale sign of a vacant home. Therefore, we encourage travelers to take a couple steps to prevent this from occurring.

For starters, travelers should ask the post office to hold their mail during their trips. Doing so will prevent holiday greeting cards and other mail from piling up and advertising the fact that you are away. Furthermore, we recommend, again, using your neighbors to help with this process. Non-USPS deliveries, such as Amazon and UPS packages, may still arrive. Having neighbors grab these for you can help keep your home from appearing empty. Of course, it also lowers the temptation for people to steal your packages! At this point, we’ll take a look at several tips for securing your home over summer vacation that our alarm customers can utilize this year.

Taking Advantage of Interactive Alarm Monitoring

When we install a home security system, we also connect it to our monitoring services. Alarm monitoring has long remained one of the most powerful security services we offer. This service creates a central station response upon alarm activation at your home. Traditionally, we would create an alarm connection to our central station using your existing phone lines. However, this technology has evolved, allowing us to create more security and convenience than ever. We now recommend monitoring your alarm by installing our Alarm.com-powered cellular dialer. This device uses a cellular network, rather than a phone line, to monitor your home. Therefore, phone outages no longer affect your security system’s ability to call our central station for help. Of course, this feature alone greatly enhances your alarm’s security.

Furthermore, our cellular dialer allows for interactive cellular monitoring. This feature allows you to use the Alarm.com mobile app to control your security system. Now, you can turn your alarm on and off remotely with your cell phone. Imagine you’ve left for vacation and realize you may have forgotten to set your alarm. No problem! Simply pull out your phone and arm your security system remotely.

Perhaps you have house or pet sitters stopping by when you’re away? Now, you can add temporary user codes with the Alarm.com mobile app. This can quickly grant access to people you need to enter your home without giving away the permanent alarm code that your family used to disarm the system. Furthermore, you can even receive alerts when your alarm gets armed or disarmed. This allows you to easily track access to your home and provide valuable security and peace of mind! Now, let’s take a look at some security equipment you can add to make your alarm even more effective.

Install Security Sensors to Add Security to Important Areas of Your Home

In our post on Unconventional Uses for Contact Sensors, we discussed installing these devices as a way to track your children’s movement throughout the home. When combined with the Alarm.com app, you can receive alerts any time you wish in order to track activity to an area. This even goes for when you haven’t armed your security system. We offer the ability to receive alerts on certain sensors at all times. This means that if someone opens an important door, cabinet, drawer, or any other area that we can put a sensor on, you will know right away!

Closets, liquor cabinets, jewelry drawers, and art and music spaces may all fit this description. First aid closets are also a popular area for a contact sensor. Perhaps a couple trips to get bandages or first aid supplies warrants a call home to see what happened. Or maybe you want to make sure that your paints end up on canvas and not on the walls, as our pictured example demonstrates. Whether you want to add extra child security, or if you want to make sure a house sitter stays within the right area of your home, Security sensors add a tremendous amount of summer vacation security. Next up, we’ll look at one more alarm-related piece of security technology that we can install to aid you in securing your home over summer vacation.

Installing Equipment to Prepare for Extreme Weather

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.

Putting it All Together and Securing Your Home Over Summer Vacation

We hope that this post aids your efforts in securing your home over summer vacation. As always, we encourage you to contact us with any questions this post may raise for you. 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. In our 38 years of business, we’ve helped over a thousand homeowners like yourself secure their properties against the entire gamut of security threats. While on site, we can address any of your existing security concerns. Moreover, we can also make suggestions of our own based on observations of your property. Together, we can create a complete security plan to keep your home as safe and secure as possible through summer vacation and beyond!