Anatomy of a Home Security System

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My home was burglarized a little over a year ago, so I will share some best practices for home security that were communicated to me by the police department.

1.) The best security system is a dog. 
2.) It generally takes the police department (in my area) about 20-minutes to respond to a security system alert, and the smart burglars know this.  That said, the average burglar is in and out within 10-15 minutes.
3.) For the not-so-smart burglars, security system stickers/signs are usually enough of a deterrent for them to move on to another house.  Bottom line: get a sticker/sign and skip the security system.
4.) Most home burglaries today occur during the day, and not at night. 
5.) Most burglars are opportunistic.  If they are patrolling your neighborhood, and see you leave your house, they will take advantage of the opportunity.
6.) If you don’t have a neighborhood watch program in your community and are concerned about security, you should check into starting one.

I also have other tips, if anyone is interested, but they are more home improvement related.

[skirge01]

I decided to resurrect this old thread, since the issue which brought this up last year has just reoccurred.  We apparently have a crotchety old man in the neighborhood, who has nothing better to do than ride his bicycle around the town, walk through people’s yards and report code violations to the borough.  Since our town does not have “private property” unless there’s a “no trespassing” sign in place, we have no recourse for previous trespasses.

However, we just put the sign up and now I want some sort of camera system in place for this old fart (no offense to any other “older” folks on the site), so that I can catch him trespassing next time.

I think the easiest location for the camera may be toward the roof of the house, since there’s a crawl space I could easily run an ethernet cable through to a switch.  Power could be an issue, so I may need to consider PoE, as well.  I’m guessing a motion activated camera might be best, so that it doesn’t waste storage space, but the distance from the roof to the driveway might be an issue there.

Any ideas for something fairly inexpensive, which I could install on my WHS box?

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