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Home Security starts at the outside of your house - Simple Light Upgrades!
After my brother suffered a home invasion I took a long and critical look at his house and then my own. In the process, I made a great many changes to the perimeter lighting of my own house.
In my brothers case, he had a privacy fence that lined the property and he has bushes in the back yard that provided cover for the home invaders. He also did not have lights on in his back yard so even after the home invasion it was an uncomfortable place to be after everything that had happened.
Upon looking at my own situation, we have an open front and back yard but we also did not keep lights on at all hours of the night and when walking around the house it would have been possible for someone with hostile intentions to approach the house and gain entry without anybody else being able to see what was hapening.
To solve this situation the first week after my brothers home invasion I replaced every light on the perimiter of our house with motion detector activated lights. We purchased coach lights as well as flood lights with adequate sensor coverage that now there are very few places where it is possible to get up to the house without activating the lights.
Another part of this improvement for me was replacing the four coach lights on the front of our house. These consist of two lights on the front of our garrage as well as two on each side of the front door. These lights on the front of the house provide instant illumination of the front yard whenever we come home after dark. If a person was to be hanging out in our front yard it would be quite a bit harder for them to ambush us with these additional lights plus with 100-watt bulbs it tends to really brighten up the front yard and the front of the house if someone was messing around the outside of the house.
The last change we made was to incorporate low voltage lighting around the back of the house and specifically the deck. The low voltage lighting provides enough light outside on the deck that if a person was to somehow get on the deck or stand near the deck without setting off the motion detector lights, we would have adequate light to see them before they could be upon us.
My brother fixed his back yard lighting through the use of a Mercury Vapor security light. This is mounted high on the back side of his house ane provides continious illumination at all hours when it is dark.
In conclusion, I believe that having adequate illumination so that you can see a potential threat is an innexpensive addition that everybody should work to incorporate into their planning. If you should have a problem, the lighting can help alert neighbors and draw attention to your situation as well as providing light for you to use to better evaluate what you can do to get out of the situation to save you and your family!
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