You already know the basics of pro­tect­ing your home. You know the val­ue of a home alarm sys­tem, and you’ve installed strong locks and doors. But some­times, you want to go the extra mile with secu­ri­ty tricks to foil any poten­tial burglar’s plans.

Check out these cre­ative secu­ri­ty tricks and strate­gies, and prod­ucts for out­smart­ing poten­tial bur­glars:

    • Light timers

If your lights stay off all the time when you’re away, it’s often clear that you’re not home, mak­ing your home vul­ner­a­ble. You could leave your lights on, but it can still be spot­ted by a bur­glar as an unnat­ur­al habit, con­tin­u­ing the red flag that the house may be unoc­cu­pied. In the end, you would just end up with a high­er elec­tric­i­ty bill.

Instead, use auto­mat­ed timers to have your lights turn on and off each day to make it look like some­body is home.

    • FakeTV

The lights aren’t the only thing that will send a sig­nal telling bur­glars your home is occu­pied. Devices like FakeTV mim­ic the light pat­terns of a flick­er­ing tele­vi­sion, but it uses far less elec­tric­i­ty than an actu­al tele­vi­sion. Just like your lights, you can set them up to turn on and off to fool bur­glars into think­ing that you are home.

    • Your neighbour’s garbage

It may sound strange, but your neighbour’s garbage could make the dif­fer­ence between a bur­glar think­ing that you’re home or think­ing that you are away.

If you’re going to be leav­ing for a long vaca­tion, invite them to leave some of their garbage in your bins and put them on the curb when it is garbage col­lec­tion day. Oth­er­wise, a thief could see no garbage being pro­duced at your house.

    • Oth­er neigh­bourly assis­tance

Trash isn’t the only help­ful thing your neigh­bours can do for your home. Park­ing in your dri­ve­way, mow­ing your lawn and leav­ing foot­prints through snow up to your door are all ways that neigh­bours can help each oth­er out to fool bur­glars.

    • Fake inter­com

A bur­glar try­ing to tell if you are home might be buzzing up to your apart­ment unit. Before you leave, ask your super if they can tem­porar­i­ly redi­rect your inter­com from your home phone to your cell. That way, you can talk to the per­son at your door as if you were in your house, even if you’re on the oth­er side of the world.

The bot­tom line is that it’s impor­tant nev­er to make your home look like it is unoc­cu­pied. Do what you can to keep bur­glars at bay by mak­ing it seem like there is always some­one home!

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Allan Baum
Security Industry veteran with over 30+ years in the industry. Founded family owned and operated Protection Plus in 1994 with his wife and has overseen its growth since. In addition to working with his wife and son, Allan has assigned the role of Chief Canine Officer to his trusted dog Waub, who joins him at the office every day.