Archives for January 2007

When Chris and I first moved into our house we talked about getting a security system. One of the reasons why we discussed getting one is because our insurance company had told us that they would take a fairly good percentage off of the price of our home insurance if we had a security system, and the other reason was that Chris at the time seemed very paranoid about security.

Chris, when he was a student, used to live in a house house with number of other students. It was one of those Student co-op houses. He’d come from a small town and suddenly he was in the heart of downtown Toronto, one of the largest cities in North America. He slept with a baseball bat under his bed. Nothing ever did happen while he lived there.

When we lived in an apartment, at one point we started hearing about a number of break ins, so we installed a second security lock on the door. That wasn’t enough for Chris though – we end up with a security plate on the door as well that would help prevent someone from jimmying the door. So we had the security plate, two security locks and a door chain. I know some people have even more locks on their doors but too me this was a lot of locks.

When we moved into the house we didn’t have any reason to suspect that we weren’t moving into a safe neighborhood. After talking with many of our neighbors we learned that there’d been very little crime in the area in the time that many had lived in their homes- and some had lived in their houses for 40 + years. We felt safe.

Yet we did put up a security light in our driveway between our neighbors house and our own, and one on the back porch. It goes on if an animal or person walks down the drive. I love it when I’m out watering the garden late at night and I purposely trigger the light in the driveway and the back at the house to give me some light while I’m watering and watching out for raccoons or skunks. Honest – that’s mostly what our security lights have caught – raccoons and cats. No skunks so far although I’ve smelled there presence nearby.

Lately though, there’s been a number of home invasions in the neighborhood. I’m not certain that a security system would prevent that from happening to us since the people that do home invasions often knock on the door first and get into the house under some guise – perhaps stating they are a repairman checking television cable or telephone service in the area. Ether way, many security systems have cameras and perhaps that would help in that type of situation as well as providing some peace of mind towards our Home Security and our general safety.

I’ve been looking at Safecall Wireless home Security System for a few reasons. One is that it’s wireless and since we are in the middle of renovating our home, tearing out walls, and putting new ones up a wireless system suits our needs. I’d hate to install a wire one and then end up taking out a wall that the wires were in. You can program it to autodial up to 6 different numbers in the event of break in, plus it has a lot of other great features that we’re interested in.

So I guess at some point in the near future I’ll probably be posting to tell you that we have a new home security system. I’ll let you know which product we decide to purchase but the wireless system sure sounds like it would be perfect for us.