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?”
3 Comments
http://www.vipsecurityalarms.com/ I found their website if anyone is interested!
Our family uses a company by the name of V.I.P security offers great pricing and superior customer support. We love the fact that VIP is not a huge call centre company, one man comes to do all the installation and for issues i call him directly we love it!
Well, your monitored system might be of some extra benefit over a piercing siren on the house, but unless the police are , GUARANTEED, less than 5 minutes from your house, they will NOT be there in time to catch the burglers. We had a B&E, while away for only 15 minutes, and when the police did a demo run through for the neighbours, the whole break and entry through a locked door, collection of electronic goods from 4 rooms, and escape to a waiting car, took only four and a half minutes. After the culprits were caught, one of the three of them confirmed the time in our place was less then 5 minutes. He also confirmed that if they had seen any indication of any type of alarm system armed, they would have bypassed our place. So much for any pious claims for expensive monitored alarm systems. We now have a system which employs a 60 watt siren concealed but open through a roof grille to outside. Hard to ignore THAT !! Ken