Why You Need a Home Security System

06-26-2020

Maybe you don’t see a lot of crime in your neighborhood. Maybe you don’t own a lot of expensive things. Why would any self-respecting thief want to break into your house when the place next door has better things to steal? These are all good points. We thought the same things. Then our house got broken into and a bunch of stuff was stolen.

It turns out that thieves don’t usually know what they are going to get before they break into a house. Unless the thief is a neighbor, which may be the case, they have no idea what you have and it’s not like a movie where the jewel thief cases the joint for weeks to determine what’s there and how best to get it. No. Most home burglars are crack heads or other addicts looking for anything they can get to turn into quick cash to feed their habit. They aren’t breaking in because they know what you have. They are breaking in to steal whatever they can find.

In our case, one day we got home from work and found the front door hanging open. We later noticed that the deadbolt lock was still locked. The thieves had simply taken a crowbar to the front door and it popped open in broad daylight like a really big request for your email address on a website. Nothing good is ever coming from that. Inside we discovered the TV was gone. The computer was missing, along with the backup drive we kept plugged into it for security reasons. Oops! And then the big one… All the Christmas presents we had purchased and wrapped up ready to be delivered to family and friends. The theft happened 3 days before Christmas. What’s funny is that the gifts weren’t all that great. If they hadn’t been wrapped up, they probably wouldn’t have been stolen. The thieves also took my favorite leather jacket. We had a really big scary looking dog, but he was safely locked up in the backyard. We suspect that more would have been stolen if the dog wasn’t there. He generally threw himself, all 100+ pounds of him, up against the back door when he wanted someone to let him in. That’s probably what scared the thieves off.

It wasn’t a high crime neighborhood. It was a nice boring older suburban area. The houses weren’t big, fancy, or new, the people living there were mostly working-class, so not a ton of money or expensive things. It’s the kind of neighborhood you lived in because you couldn’t afford anything better. A friend warned us that sometimes the thieves come back a month or two later after insurance has paid off and we replaced all the stolen items. 

We will probably never know why our house was broken into and not the neighbors, but we put a quick stop to it by installing a home security system. Nothing fancy, just a couple of detectors that would tell you if one of the doors was opened and a motion detector in the living room. This was fine because it was a small house with only a front door and a back door. The motion detector was placed such that nobody could get to or from the bedrooms without setting off the motion detector. There was a keypad by the front door so we could turn the system on or off when we left home or arrived back. We also put the sign in the yard and stickers on the windows. A relatively simple system that did the trick. We were never broken into again.

While it was a simple home security system, we had it installed by professionals since we didn’t really know how to do it ourselves. We just called the first company that we found, but later discovered that other companies had better systems for cheaper. Don’t make that mistake. Use AffordableHomeSecurity.com to help you determine which company you should use to install and monitor your system. They’ve already figured out which companies are the best and most trustworthy.