Securing Your Living Room

As you’ve picked up on by now if you read last week’s post on Securing Your Basement Effectively, we take a whole-home approach when working with customers to secure their homes. In that post, we focused on one of your home’s most remote and under-secured areas. This week, we shift our attention to the room in your home where you likely spend the most time: the living room. Securing this area comes with its own unique set of challenges. For one, your living room often advertises the presence of valuables to passersby, which can prove quite inviting for thieves. Additionally, the time spent in your living room means that this room deserves extra equipment to secure you from a variety of threats while you’re in your home. In today’s post, we show you how we can help with securing your living room using a variety of approaches and security technology.

First, we’ll show you how to view your living room from the outside with the “eyes of a criminal.” Doing so can help you make this area a less attractive target. From there, we’ll discuss a few ways that a security system can help you secure your living area. Specifically, we’ll take a look at how you can add monitored life safety devices to this important area. Then, we’ll shift our focus to burglary-related security devices for your alarm. Finally, we’ll detail some panic button options you can add to put help as close as the push of a button at any time. Now, let’s dive in to our primer on adding living room security with some best practices to make your house a less likely target for thieves.

Look at Your Living Room Through the Eyes of a Criminal

You may remember from our post on Minimizing Loss from a Home Break-In that thieves have specific items on their “wish-list” when they break into a home. These items generally include electronics, jewelry, and cash. Burglars know that they can turn certain items around for some quick money either on the street or at a pawn shop. The sight of laptops or expensive television sets from the street can entice thieves quite a bit. After all, they know that a break-in will provide them with some value even if they find nothing other than what they can see from the street. Furthermore, some families even place these items with reach of their windows. This means that someone could grab them without even getting into the house!

We recommend placing televisions and computers next to (or in some cases with televisions, mounted onto) walls not visible from the street if at all possible. Walk by your own house and consider what you can see from your home’s exterior. Can you see or grab anything valuable without entering into your home? If so, consider and appliance configurations that could minimize this risk. Later on, we’ll also look at adding security contacts to alert you if a burglar does attempt a living room robbery. Let’s now look at some ways that adding an alarm can help with securing your living room against a variety of threats.

Securing Your Living Room with Alarm Technology

Installing a monitored security system represents one of of the most effective security measures that you can take. These alarms create a blaring siren response upon activation. In turn, this alerts anyone on the premises to the emergency. Additionally, it often scares the perpetrator away as well. Moreover, our alarm monitoring services add an important layer to this security. Upon receiving a signal from your alarm, our central station reaches out to you and, if necessary, dispatches the proper authorities. Obviously, this adds quite a bit of security to any property. In this section, we share a couple valuable ways adding this technology can help with securing your living room. Let’s start this discussion with an overview of adding monitored life safety to this area of your home.

Add Monitored Life Safety Devices to Your Living Room

Our Primer on Carbon Monoxide Security explains why carbon monoxide (or “CO”) poses such a major threat to family safety. This gas defies detection by the senses and can prove especially dangerous in areas where residents may doze off. Carbon monoxide poisoning creates symptoms similar to that of the flu. Dizziness, an upset stomach, and confusion are all linked to dangerous levels of CO exposure. However, fatalities often occur when sleeping individuals fail to wake up in time to experience any symptoms and get fresh air. Of course, living rooms make a popular place to nap in front of the television after a long day at work or a big meal. For this reason, we strongly recommend adding CO detection to this area of your home.

As we pointed out earlier, living rooms often hold many electronic appliances and cords. Therefore, adding a smoke alarm in your living room also increases security and life safety. As an additional security feature, consider installing monitored smoke and carbon monoxide detection. Doing so creates a central station response upon activation of a smoke or CO detector. This means that a fire in your absence will create a fire station response. Additionally, the central station will call you if a CO detector activates. This especially helps if you have kids home in your absence, as you can ensure their safety during this time. Since any complete security plan involves life safety measures, we strongly encourage you to install this equipment. Now, let’s look at adding another type of security equipment in the form of security system sensors for your living room.

Install Burglar Alarm Contacts to Address Living Room Security Vulnerabilities

When we design a security system, we take a room-by-room approach to create a unique alarm system for each and every one of our customers’ homes. Due to their central location and multiple entry points, living rooms often require a variety of alarm system contacts. For starters, living rooms generally have an exterior door that receives a door contact. Additionally, living rooms often have many windows that can also work as points of entry. Burglars can pry windows open or simply smash through them to get in. These options are especially popular for a thief in cases where shrubbery or fences hide your windows from the street or from neighbors.

We recommend taking account of what specific dangers you may face and installing security equipment that addresses them. For example, glass break detectors can detect broken glass within a wide radius of the detector itself. We recommend these for homeowners with picture windows or windows large enough to smash and climb through. We can also individually contact double-hung windows. Doing so will create an alarm response if a thief pries a window open to gain entry. Motion detectors can also efficiently monitor large areas of your home for motion caused by a burglar already inside the house. For more options regarding window security, we recommend reading our post on Adding Window Security to Your Home. Now, let’s take a look at one more security tip to increase your own living room security.

Create Panic Button Response Options for Your Living Room

Panic buttons can create security in multiple ways depending on your individual needs. We detailed many different options for these devices in our Panic Button Options for Your Security System. Some of these devices create a medical response upon activation. This can prove especially useful in homes with older residents. Additionally, we also provide panic buttons that create a police response. You can also choose whether to have these buttons create an audible siren response or a discreet, silent signal sent to our central station. If you monitor your alarm through an interactive cellular dialer, such as ours powered by Alarm.com, you can even use your phone as a panic device! This option puts just about every panic function you might need at your fingertips, greatly adding to your overall living room security.

Putting it All Together and Securing Your Living Room

We hope that this post aids your own efforts in securing your living room. As always, 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. We understand that it often takes some guidance to sort through all of your security options. Furthermore, we also invite 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. Over our 38 years in business, we’ve helped over a thousand customers find solutions that fit their security needs and deliver the individual user experience they desire. We’d love to assist you in securing your own home and gaining your trust as well. Together, we can create a plan to keep your entire home, and your family, as safe and secure as possible!