The Expat Guide To Securing Your Home Away From Home
Thinking about whether the house you left behind is secured can be disconcerting. More so if you do not have plans to let your property go yet. To ease your mind, here are six ways you can secure your home while you are away:
1. Get a home monitoring system
When improving your home’s security, you can’t go wrong with a reliable home monitoring system.
A home monitoring system allows you to observe and monitor what’s going on inside your house at any time. Nowadays, you can watch your house even if you’re far away, as long as you have access to the Internet.
Besides monitoring the state of your home anytime and anywhere, it can also serve as a deterrent. If someone attempts something to your house, a visual home monitoring system can make them think twice before even doing so.
2. Conduct regular home maintenance
Minor issues around your house can seem innocuous at first, but if you leave it be, these can serve as vulnerabilities in your house. Since they’re vulnerable, someone can take advantage of it to find a way to get into your home.
To help avoid that issue, you must be a responsible homeowner and conduct regular home maintenance.
When you care for and go through your entire home to check potential issues and repair them, there will be fewer vulnerabilities that someone can exploit. At the same time, your quality of living improves simply because you’ve taken the time to improve or maintain the state of your house.
It also has the additional effect of avoiding your property’s devaluation because of poor maintenance and care on your part.
3. Lock up valuables in a safe
Although you want to be comfortable in your home, you still need to be mindful of what you do with your valuables. You specifically need to be aware of where you place them.
It might be convenient for you to place your valuables somewhere accessible. More so if you use them often. But accessibility can also lead to vulnerability.
If someone breaks in, they can quickly snatch your valuables. Therefore, try and avoid making it a habit to leave your valuables out in the open. At the very least, they shouldn’t be somewhere near a door or a window where someone can sneakily take it away from you or take it and run away with them.
Also, by keeping them out of sight, people passing by and looking in won’t see it and pique their interest in your house.
4. Don’t leave a hide-a-key
Instead of leaving spare keys under a flower pot, we suggest that you look for alarm interactive commercial services. After all, when you’re hiding a key outside the home, you’re thinking about keeping it away from direct sight but not hiding it so well that you can’t find it.
That means that you’re opening yourself up to dangerous situations. If you make it convenient for you to find the key, it’s undoubtedly going to be suitable for others to find it.
Instead of leaving a hide-a-key outside, it might be better to rely on a friend or neighbor. You can ask them to keep a copy of a key to your house, as long as they’re people you know and trust and are responsible.
5. Install an outdoor sensor light
Aside from a home monitoring system, you should also install an outdoor sensor light.
Outdoor sensor lights turn on when it detects movement outside of your house or wherever you place the sensor lights. If a person is trying to sneak into your home, the outdoor sensor lights turning on all of a sudden can surprise them and make them run away.
If you have security cameras outside, it will be easier for the cameras to pick up who or what is outside because there’s better lighting.
6. Disconnect your garage door
Even if you have an excellent garage door that doesn’t have any damage, it can still be a vulnerable part of your house.
There are plenty of things that a thief can do to finagle their way to the other side of your garage door. Therefore, you might want to do your best to ensure that doesn’t happen.
One way to prevent that would be by unplugging your garage opener while you’re away and your car is inside the garage. That way, criminals can’t exploit it to get your garage to open.
It’s also a good idea to lock the door inside your garage that’s connected to your house while you’re at it.
The Takeaway
Taking the time to go through these security measures will help you leave your house without any worries. As such, you can enjoy your time in a different country without worrying about your home security.
But if you’re compelled to, you can always check on it through your monitoring system.
The steps listed above should help protect, secure, and avoid any home security concerns. Thus, ensure that you do these before you leave.