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Top 10 Security Tips for Home During Holidays | Mr. Locksmith™ Blog

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Hi, I’m Terry Whin-Yates fromMr. Locksmith™. I have the Top 10 security tips to secure your home during the holiday season.

1- Rekey Your Locks & Lock Your Doors

2- Lights, leave the TV on

3- Mail

4- Newspapers/Flyers, etc.

5- Alarms

6- CCTV

7- No Gifts seen from the street under the Christmas Tree

8- Lock your windows, doors, etc. all the time.

9- No Empty boxes outside showing off your new TV etc.

10- Facebook and Social Media

Bonus: Engrave everything, take pictures and serial numbers. 

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Rekey your house or upgrade your deadbolts.

One of the first things you should do is lock your doors. Lock your doors, lock your windows, lock your patio doors, lock your car. Just lock it. It’s amazing how many homes and condos are open. You can walk through the neighborhood, and this is what the crooks do, we call them doorshakers, they just shake the door, see what’s unlocked, they go in and steal your stuff.

The next tip is rekey your house. If you don’t know where every single key is, if you’ve moved in and never changed the locks, if you’ve lost keys, if you’ve lent out keys to repair people, service people, whatever, rekey your house. You gotta know where they all are. It’s amazing how many break-ins happen because somebody has a key, they walk in and just open the door with the key and steal everything you got. So rekey your locks, upgrade your deadbolts put on some good high quality deadbolts that will stop the people from picking, bumping, kicking the doors in. Let’s make that door secure. Put on a good, high quality deadbolt. I have some great high security locks, the Abloy High Security Locks, Medeco and Schlage Primus. Upgrade your deadbolts to a good high-security lock, and don’t get the SmartKeybecause the are  dumb.

Abloy High Security Deadbolt

Make your house look lived in. If you have lights on, but have them, you know, you could nowadays, with, you could have them on programmable, you can have them turn off and on, get your lights on, have the house look lived in. One of my favorite things to do is when I go away is I leave the TV on. I put the TV on to the news channel, leave it there, I turn up the sound, the flickering of the TV screen makes it look like people are walking around in the house. The other cool feature is outside, all they hear is the bass, they hear boom boom boom boom boom. They can’t hear, they know somebody’s talking inside and they hear the bass outside, they see the flickering lights. Leaving the TV on is a fantastic way of making your house looked in.

Mail and newspapers. You’re going away, get the mail so it’s not piled up. Get somebody picking up your mail. Don’t just let it pack up there and make it look like the home’s not lived in. Same thing with newspapers, junk mail, flyers, all that garbage that comes during the holiday season. Get, if you’re away, get somebody to move it. One of the problems I had where I lived before, I always came in the back door and one day I went out the front door and there was like piles of flyers cuz I never went to the front door. Check your front door, make sure that there’s not a bunch of old stuff there, even if you’re home, you got all this stuff that makes it looks like nobody lives there. So when you’re going away, get some, get a help, get that stuff moved out of there.

One of my favorite security tips is get a gun safe for the home. First of all, if you have firearms, you should have a gun safe anyways to lock up your firearms. Firearms, ammunition, everything. However, you don’t have to have firearms in a gun safe. Even the inexpensive gun safes are a great place to store, you know, some of your, maybe your, some of your expensive china, pictures, paper and valuable items from fire. They will not protect any valuables at all from any burglary attempt. If you seen my other videos, you know how easy it is to open fire safes. Fire safes are good for fire protection only, not for valuables. Papers, that sort of thing. Burglary safes are rated for protecting your items, they’re burglar-resistant, they are meant for your jewelry, your gold, your cash. They are meant to slow down burglars. Your fire safe and your burglary safe should be secured, anchorable to the floor or wall, very easy to do. That slows the criminals down a little bit. You can get a combination fire and burglary safes together, so they have fire protection and burglary-resistant protection, That’s my favorite for the home. They’re not inexpensive, they start at $500 up but they’re a very good investment. You got one safe, does everything. If you have firearms in the house, you need a gun safe. Inexpensive gun safe to expensive gun safe, they’re all good. Of course the more money you spend, the more highly rated they are, the better it is to protect your firearms. One of my favorite thing is you don’t have guns, firearms to protect your goods. Get a big gun safe, anchor it to the wall and floor, and put in some of the stuff that you just don’t want stolen, you know, a few of your watches, some inexpensive jewelry, I put my, I have some favorite china that was given to me by my grandmother, I put my china in the gun safe. It’s big, it’s got a lot of space, I put my cameras in there. Yes, they should go in the fire safe, but half the time, no it’s not going in, so what I do is I put the my cameras, my camera gear, some bits and pieces, some of my favorite stuff is in my gun safe. Alarm systems. The days are now gone when a sticker on your door will stop them from busting in.

Gun Safe

Have a good quality alarm system but realize the limitations. Right now, everybody has alarms. Half the time they’re not turned on. You have an alarm system, turn it on. The thieves kick the door in, the alarm goes off, they run in real quick, steal what they can and get out. Alarm systems are great, but they’re not gonna stop break-ins anymore. One of the recommendations we do to a lot of people if you’re away, it’s inexpensive, but have a runner service. A runner service is a security guard company, when the alarm goes off, they get the notification, forget the police showing up, I don’t know what city you live in, the police never show up to home alarms, especially around the holiday season. It’s a low low priority if they even show up, so if you’re really concerned, have the alarm will go off, the runner service will show up, then if the runner service sees that there’s a break-in, they will call the police, and they will also, you know, you have an arrangement to secure your property if it was busted into. But again, alarm systems are great, they’re inexpensive. Monitored systems are getting less expensive and there’s even systems now that go right to your smartphone so you get a break-in, your smartphone will go off. Which takes me to the next point. I love cameras. You could put cameras inside your house now, cameras are not gonna prevent crime, but they do aide the police in identifying who went in, and if they can look at the video and see who’s been in there, then they can usually piece it together with other break-ins in the area. Burglars and criminals don’t get caught until their 27th break-in, so they’re doing break-in, break-in, break-in, and the statistics show they get caught about every 27th break-in, so they’ve had a good free for all for a long time, so when you have some video evidence, it can help. Also, it’s amazing when you have break-ins and you see it’s a relative or a neighbor, that’s always kind of amazing when you see that. So, cameras are great to have and again, you can monitor these from your smartphone.

If your Christmas tree is visible from outside, because you’re showing off the lights, whatever, don’t have gifts under the Christmas tree. A lot of people that come home after shopping, or out at a party, and every gift under the tree is stolen, you can see it from the street, you can see inside, they got the lights on, they got everything, they looks like nobody’s home, there’s all the gifts, they go in there and steal the gifts. Don’t have your Christmas gifts visible under the tree from outside. Common sense there. This helps a little bit before Christmas, but especially after Christmas or Boxing Day in Canada. Don’t put the empty boxes outside on the street. You got the new TV set, you got the new home theater system, got whatever, don’t put the boxes on the street. Flatten them, cut them, turn them inside out, don’t make it look like you’ve got that brand new super duper 4K TV set, and there’s the empty box sitting on the street. Don’t put your empty boxes showing what you got on the street.

Facebook and Social Media. Don’t post, we’re going away to Hawaii on vacation on your Facebook. You have friends and they may have shady friends and people know you’re going away, they know you’re away for a month, they got a long time to plan to get your house. Yeah I know it’s tough, we like to post things but be aware, other people will now know your house is empty.

One of the basics that nobody does anymore, and it’s a real help to the police when they recover your stolen goods is engrave your information on everything you own. Put your name, put your phone number and the one thing that the police love is you put your driver’s license number. Put your state or province, put your driver’s license number on your items that you own. Put your name on it, put it on the back of the TV, put it on everything. You can buy these little Dremel engravers and just engrave information on everything you own. I’ve gone into houses and I’ve seen where they’ve noticed the big engraving on everything and they’ve just left it behind. Social security numbers and social insurance numbers aren’t good to put on, because a lot of times the different government agencies can’t access that information. One thing in the old days they would say put that on, but police departments have a difficult time getting that information from the government. So your driver’s license information, your phone number with area code is fantastic.

Terry Whin-Yates Mr. Locksmith

I hope you enjoyed the Top 10 security tips for securing your home during the holidays. And I wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. I hope you enjoyed watching this video. Subscribe to my Mr. Locksmith™ YouTube channel. 

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