Using your burglar alarm. (house, good, light, panel)
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Some of you own alarm systems for your homes. Some of you know I was in the security business for 31 years, retiring in 2006. Let me relate a story about why you should use your system each time you leave your house.
One of my former customers got a telephone call from his wife who said something wasn't right in their house. She had just gotten home and the keypad was pulled off the wall and the wires were cut, and she though she heard something upstairs. Her husband told he to call 911, and that he would be home ASAP. On his way home he called my son (presently owner of the alarm company) and asked him to meet him there. Upon on arriving my son noticed several cops were outside looking at tracks in the yard and snow. Upon entering the house he noticed the keypad wires had been cut, and also noticed insulation on the floor below the crawlspace into the attic. He got a ladder so a cop could check the attic. The cop came down and said no one was in the attic. My son crawled up the ladder and into the attic with his flashlight and found a person who had covered himself with insulation to hide from the police. He was four feet from the burglar when he saw the insulation move and realized a person was there. A cop joined him and together they pulled the burglar out of the insulation and down through the crawl hole. The story ended with the burglar going to jail, but it could have ended much differently. When the wife left to run errands, she didn't arm the alarm system. When she came home, the burglar was still in the house and choose to hide instead of assaulting her. The moral of the story: it does no good to have the very best alarm on the market if you don't use it everytime you leave your home. This home was a very nice house in one of the better neighborhoods that never have a problem. Something the home owner learned: with the better alarm systems when keypad wires are cut, it does not turn off the alarm. With 'lick & stick' alarm systems, cutting the keypad wires will disable the alarm. Know the difference in systems before you buy.
my macaw is "potty trained" and flys back to his cage when he needs to go (hes fully flighted and almost always out, hes also a wonderfull attack bird lol) and my dogs are 100% housebroken.
and i never need to remember to reset it.
i do have to feed it though lol.
weve had issues with alarm companies in the past even with some of the "good ones".
I have a monitored alarm system, and they call me before they call the police. I am also a police officer. If I am anywhere near the house, I am going to be responding instead of the police. Then I will be posting a topic on here asking how to remove blood stains from carpeting.
I agree with the OP, use your alarm system every time you leave the house. Even if you are going to be gone for about 20 minutes at the grocery store, you don't know if someone was on your street waiting for someone to leave the house. It only takes a couple of minutes to steal a couple of large items. I recommend alarms with cellular backup in case your interior alarm components or exterior telephone wires are damaged.
Yes, the new cellular backup units that have just come out are not expensive to buy, and having one shouldn't raise your monitoring charges a whole lot either. I will get rid of my land line competely when I get the cellular backup. But, you watch, it won't be long and taxes will be tacked onto cell phones just like it was on land line. Before you know it, the government will be haveing us talking into to two tin cans with a string between them. Come to think of it, there are some good things about being old...
What happens when you are not home and can't use your guns or command your dogs or whatever so called "protection" you have at home? 3 Dogs or 6 or whatever the number of animals it is you have at home only takes 1 shot or 1 stab or even food poisoning...
Where I live we have one and it can go off if i shower to hot and then leave the bath door open. I get a call with wet hair, asking if i am ok. I usually reply are you hot? If it's a woman. In general they laff. Some how the smoke dector part of the alarm gets set off by steam I guess.
Then there is almost no time someone isn't here. Most of the time there is 3 of us, only sometimes just 2, but almost never 1 or less. Being remote tends to help
You can't see this place from anywhere unless you are up in the air. Locals are surprised to know this place is even here at all.
And there is no time at least 1 dog isn't here and that's only 2 days a year, for the groomer.
I'm a security consultant, and I think an intruder alarm system is the best mode of intrusion deterrence and detection. A dog is fine, but some chloroform or even a steak/piece of raw meat can deter/neutralise it readily.
I would generally recommend a PIR-based system for indoor use (tuned not to pick up pets, since dogs and cats obviously emit infra-red radiation also) ,a minimum of two keypads (one at the front and back entrance) and a control panel (the brain of the system) in a location that is not easily reachable once an intruder enters. I would also say that hooking the keypad to a cellular/mobile telephone is a must. You can buy devices that can send an SMS, whenever there is an intrusion, and since GSM is worldwide, you can most likely pick it up worldwide. For outdoor use, photoelectric beam devices are better, since PIR detection would be far too prone to false/nuisance alarms in the open (any dog, cat, or other animal could set it off, or even an innocent and non-intrusive human passing by).
As for the cutting of wires, this is possible, but can be too time-intensive for an intruder. this depends on how visible the wires are for the large part. Putting wires through walls or through ceilings can mitigate this a lot. Also, I would say since the point of an intruder alarm system is to protect from/deter intrusion, then a 30 minute trip to the shops is enough time for a burglar to strike.
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