After a Saturday night out with friends, Michael and Erica O'Keeffe returned to their west end Toronto home to discover that it had been burglarized. “When we opened the front door there were coats and stuff all over the floor and we realized that somebody had been in the house,” says Michael O'Keeffe. The thieves had forced the rear door open and made off with “basically anything they could carry out” including irreplaceable jewellery, watches, a digital camera, and a bottle of Scotch that had been sitting on a counter by the door (the latter item leading police to believe that the crooks were likely kids). That night the O'Keeffe's joined the unwitting ranks of roughly 150,000 other Canadian families who experience a home burglary every year. And the following week, they joined countless others who have installed home alarm systems.
Mid-range systems
The most-basic home alarm system is just that: an alarm. If someone tries to enter your home through a window or door while the system is armed, a high pitched siren goes off alerting you – and most of the neighbourhood – to the break-in. With a typical system, you'll have contacts on the exterior doors and basement and ground-floor windows connected (wired or wireless) to a central control panel. More sophisticated set-ups can include interior motion detectors, noise sensors – to detect, for example, breaking glass – and security cameras.
You can hire a home security company to install a system or buy the components at the hardware store and install them yourself. You can pick up individual window and door alarms for $10 to $25, motion detectors for $30. Whole-house packages start at $250. While a piercing siren will be of obvious benefit if someone tries to break in while you sleep, they're largely ineffective when you're not home. As a rep from one alarm company put it, “When's the last time you did anything about a car alarm going off?”
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