Thursday, June 16, 2011

Exterior Security Lighting

By Owen Jones


It is quite natural that we all want to keep our homes and businesses safe and well looked after, but there are many ways in which this can be accomplished. The cheapest and most cost effective way is exterior security lighting

It really is a no brainer, poor lighting can make a home or business a much more appealing object than the house next door because it has less adequate exterior security lighting. Burglars look for poorly lit points of entry into premises that appear to contain wealth, so when you are planning the security system for your home or business you should try to think like a criminal.

Look at your premises from the outside, or look at someone else's first and ask yourself, how you would get in there if you had to. Imagine that you forgot your keys or that there is a serious problem in your office. How would you get in? This is where the criminal gets in and you must learn how to block his every move.

Ten years ago, I lived in a bungalow alone with my small, knee-high dog and armed robbers attacked me in my home, in spite of the fact that I had a reasonable home security system. Do not let it happen to you. My blunder was that I had inadequate exterior security lighting.

They had severed my phone line during the day and because I used a mobile phone for most of my calls, I did not realize. Also my dog was sick, but I did not realize that she had been poisoned too. At eleven o'clock at night there was a knock on the front door and I opened it, thinking that it was a neighbour in distress.

A man charged in and over-powered me and the rest was not nice. However, the whole regrettable affair could have been prevented, if I had thought like them..

I was in the habit of drawing the curtains when I got home, so I did not see that they had removed the lamps from my exterior security lighting too.

My advice is to check your exterior security lighting every night when you get home and keep the bushes or shrubs cut low around your front and back doors. Make sure that your exterior security lighting is working every evening and make sure that you can see who is ringing your door bell.

Provide your garden and your doors with lots of light. Let them be on motion sensors and check who is at your door from a side window that looks out onto your front door. I had a gorgeous frosted glass pane in my front door, but that is no use. I could not identify anyone through it.

Get a panic button fitted by your doors, a big one, so that if you are surprised you can swipe out and still hit it and above all make your next door neighbours aware that if your external siren sounds, that you are in danger and that you need help immediately. If you are not in trouble, you can always say sorry later.




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