National Home Security Month – Secure Your Home
October is National Home Security Month in the UK, with the annual event aiming to raise awareness about home security and provide professional advice to consumers looking for ways to make their home more secure.
Here at APECS, the safety of our customers is always at the forefront of our minds when developing products and that is why we are dedicated to bringing both quality and security to our customers and their families. Our range of products from euro cylinders to mortice locks and from door closers to hinges showcase these core beliefs and keep our customers safe and secure on a daily basis.
Recent studies have found that over 75% of all domestic break-ins are made through a door, with a forced lock entry and an unlocked door being the two most common forms of entry.
With that in mind, here are some APECS top tips we’ve got to help you secure your home.
Change Your Locks As Soon As You Move In
If you’ve just bought a new property, or you’re in a rental that allows you to make changes, you should definitely change your locks as soon as you move in. You don’t know who still has existing copies of the previous tenants keys and you don’t know what type of people they are, so we recommend changing your locks as soon as you move into a new property if it is possible.
With that in mind, you should also look to install the best lock possible when you do change them.
Upgrade Your Locks
Another great bit of advice is to look into what type of locks you have on your property and whether these can upgraded. Plenty of houses and flats, whether new builds or older properties will have substandard locks on them as they are cheap and people often don’t know much about locks. The quality of your lock makes a huge difference in how easy it is for someone to gain access to your property though.
If you have a composite or uPVC door and you’ve got a basic euro cylinder in there, a would be thief can snap this cylinder in seconds and gain entry to your property. For this type of door, you’ll want to upgrade to a KM 3* euro cylinder which will provide you with a much higher level of security. Even better is a cylinder which is both KM 3* and Sold Secure Diamond approved, such as the APECS AP Euro Cylinder.
If you have a wooden door with a mortice lock inside, you’ll also want to make sure you have a quality lock. The important thing to look out for here is the BSI logo – this looks like a heart, where the top of the heart looks like the letter B and there should be an S inside the heart. This logo should be present on the faceplate of the lock if it BSI certified. If you don’t have a BS3621 certified lock inside your door, you could well be unable to sign up for home insurance, or unable to claim if you have wrongly stated that you have an insurance approved lock.
Lock Your Doors!
This one might sound obvious, but you would be surprised at the amount of burglaries that take place where the thief enters through an unlocked door. Often this will be when someone is in the garden, or upstairs and someone can enter quietly, take your car keys and then voila, your car is gone. Or even worse, when people go out and forget to lock the door!
We can’t stress enough how important it is to lock your doors and windows – no matter how safe you think your neighbourhood is, or how unlikely you think it is that someone could walk in whilst you’re sunbathing - keep those doors and windows locked!
Garden Security
If you’ve got a garden, there’s also a few things you can do to ensure that your home remains secure.
If you have wheelie bins outside your house, make sure you position them away from any flat roofed areas, or fences. You don’t want to give thieves easy access to your property, or the chance to get onto your roof where they might be able to enter areas which have open windows, such as bedrooms.
You’ll also want to make sure that your side gate, or rear gate is secured by a weatherproof, high security padlock. If you’ve got a bog standard padlock on your gate, they can become very easy to break open, especially after a couple of years of weather damage. You’ll want to ensure you have a heavy duty, weatherproof padlock, such as the APECS Mastiff Padlock on exterior gates to ensure thieves can’t easily break them open.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are lots of things you can do to help secure your home and some of them don’t cost anything. It’s vitally important to follow these basic guidelines to ensure that you keep your home safe and sound.
For more tips, take a look at our blog.
