Secure Your Home Like a Pro

When it comes to home security - get an enormous dog!

A large intimidating dog. It doesn't need to be that agressive, just needs to bark loud at possible burgulars wanting to jump your fence. If you are going away for a while, have your neighbour or a friend park their car in your driveway (not garage) every so often.
Go to the hardware store and buy timers to put on your lamps so they turn on and off at intervals. Get someone to retrieve your mail. If your going for a long time, get someone to mow your lawn.

 Keep your jewellery/money/goods in your dishwasher or if you don't have one put them in the manhole or laundry basket. Engrave your TV, hifi computer and laptop and take photos. And if you
want to all out - boobytrap your house. The best one is to ask a local clothes store if they have any broken mannequins/dummies, then dress it up and lay it  on the floor in a main room with tiles. Mix barbeque sauce, tomato sauce and water and put as much as you want around it. Guaranteed as soon as someone finds it they will get out of your house fast.

You are paying 500% markup on all electronic devices. They are all flawed and willl either not work properly or be crazy sensitive, this is not mistake either, as you will require th technician to re-attend to fix, costing more money. Technicians are extremely lazy and expensive, they cost the company roughly $35p/h and you will be charged about $80-85p/h.

As an example - For a monitored security system - you will pay somewhere between  $1600-$7000. The actual cost to the company is about $300 (incl installation time charged by tech). Monitoring will cost $320 425 a year. The cost to the company is $27. And after all of this, the alarm will activate like crazy for false alarms (bugs, heat, cold etc) which creates extra charges on your phone bill  and insane charges for having to get a patrol car to respond.

 The police more than often will not respond to an alarm activation. Friend of mine had the rare case that they said they would respond to a priority 1 duress alarm, and called back 6 hours later asking for the address because they lost it and were going to check it out.

Security systems are not preventative measures. They do nothing other than alert you to the fact that you have been robbed, which you are helpless and you would find out later anyway.