My home is my castle

2024 Author: James Gerald | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 14:00

Detectives conditionally divide expropriators of other people's savings into two types: amateurs and professionals. The first - homeless people, drug addicts, alcoholics, teenage punks - do not bother with the preparation. After all, they don't care what they take - money, things, audio or video equipment - so they climb into the first apartment they come across. Pros are another matter. Experienced, cunning and well organized. They only take money, sometimes grabbing jewelry. They have everything on stream: planning, reconnaissance, execution, cover and sales. First, they look after a rich apartment: plastic windows, expensive curtains, an air conditioner, a satellite TV antenna - a guarantee that the owners have something to profit from. It happens that they sit "on the tail" of a brand new foreign car and bring it to the very house. The rest is a matter of technology: to establish the identity of the owner (it is not a problem to find the database of the Central Address Bureau these days), to study the daily routine of the owners, wait for the weekend when the whole family goes to the dacha in a jamb, and here the iron door is not a hindrance, as well as and concierges, panic buttons or video cameras at the entrance to the entrances …

More often than not, thieves enter apartments in several ways. In housing on the lower floors - through windows and balconies, climbing up drain or gas pipes, jumping from the canopies of entrances or outbuildings. To the upper floors - again through the windows and balconies, only having already descended from the roof with the help of ropes and climbing equipment, or through the ventilation duct. To apartments on the middle floors - through the door, knocking it out, breaking the lock or picking up the keys.

Yes, if you want to preserve your private property, strengthen the family redoubts well!

Intercom

This device, so well known to all Muscovites, saves more from homeless people and neighboring adolescents than from professional burglars - when the power supply is turned off, the electromechanical locks installed in city entrances automatically open so as not to block the residents, for example, in the event of a fire. This is what thieves use when they turn off the power supply: come in whoever you want, take what you want …

Having extra money available, we spend it on a video intercom - in principle, the same as the notorious intercom, only with a tiny hidden video camera. A big plus: you can install several video cameras and watch what is happening not only at the entrance to the staircase, but also in the staircase, and in front of the door to your own apartment. If you want to know who came to you in your absence - connect memory blocks for 10 or more frames. If you want to see in the dark, you need a very high resolution camera with an infrared illuminator that reacts to heat. It is interesting to take a closer look at the newcomer - install a zoom lens on the camera, which will allow you to bring the image closer … In short, the video intercom is our second "eyes and ears".

Door

An ordinary wooden door opening into an apartment can even be knocked out with a shoulder. But the standard metal structure is capable of surviving a shooting from a Makarov pistol. True, it will not save you from a machine gun fire either: you will need an armored one.

The number of locks is a personal matter of the customer. And yet it is best to install two - a regular and a safe (when pins or metal strips come out of the door to the side, up and down). The most common are domestic "Mitemp", "Elbor", "Class", as well as Italian "Cesa" and "Natura". However, everyone who has a direct or indirect relationship to the locks - even a thief - will say that the best locks are Finnish, made by "ABLOY" firms, which differ both in the quality of the metal and in the special secrecy of the mechanism itself. They say that it is simply impossible to drill it out.

Window

We install shutters on them. To protect against thieves, it is better to install extruded shutters with a special certificate of protection against burglary - they are the thickest, with a stiffening rib in the middle, and it will be more difficult to break them. Even if a thief saws such shutters with a jigsaw, only Dynamite - aka Vladimir Turchinsky - can unbend them. But you can not be afraid of him!

Signaling

Do you think you've already turned the apartment into an impregnable fortress? Not at all … There is another weak point - the air duct, especially if you removed part of the riser and built your household appliances into the niche that was very useful. The hole is usually closed up with a piece of thin plywood, which to knock out - once to blow. Having broken or moved the grate above the ventilation box in the attic, the thieves lower the cable into the hatch and go down through it. Kicking the plywood - and they are in the kitchen. They leave in the same way, but together with the owner's things. Therefore, if you are dismantling a part of the ventilation riser, then take the trouble to weld a metal grate between the ventilation riser and the removable part of the duct in the attic, and also fix the removable part of the duct on the riser.

And yet there is nothing better than a burglar alarm. In order to scare off an intruder, sometimes the cheapest alarm system is enough - the one that yells in the stairwell. Since most of the villains are not professional thieves, but marginalized people who wander around the entrances in the hope of stealing something. In addition, the blinking LED above the front door - the burglar alarm marker - in itself is quite a deterrent …

It is very simple, quick and fairly cheap to install the systems that are offered by all the private security units. Along the perimeter of windows, entrance and balcony doors, special foil is reinforced, which blocks all entrances and exits until the arrival of a police squad. However, even here difficulties await us: you cannot install such a system on plastic windows … Therefore, if you once spent money on plastic windows, now you will have to spend money on volumetric IR (infrared) sensors that respond to heat and movement. But keep in mind, these sensors react not only to humans, but also to cats and dogs … And even to a draft.

More sophisticated alarm systems will attract the attention of neighbors with sirens and flashing beacons and transmit signals to the central monitoring station. Here you will find several sensors, a panic button, a siren, and control of the telephone line (if the telephone wire breaks, the system itself will give an alarm). And there is no need to enter into negotiations with the dispatcher - the system automatically works after a certain code is dialed.

Do you want to spoil the renovation with extra wires? Install a radio sensor - and the signals will be transmitted over the radio channel. Would you like to have a GSM module installed that allows you to transmit an alarm signal to your cell phone, whether you are in Zhmerinka or in the Canary Islands? True, there is little use from such a notification … Only you will lose sleep.

Is there any hope?

Professionals claim that there is no universal protection against burglars. Metal doors, locks, bars on the windows, alarms are a barrier only for amateurs. If an experienced burglar decided to rob your apartment, he will rob it. Despite all of the above obstacles.

However, I'm going to install all of the above. The most important thing, as the great Bender said, is to bring confusion to the enemy's camp. The enemy must lose his peace of mind. He needs to be made nervous … What if it works?