Home robbery

Sammy was it your pets setting off the false alarms?

Yep, also have a few flush-mount piezo screamers in the ceiling. Flush-mount are best as they’re much harder to disable with a swift smack from a solid object.

Best thing is to have noisy noise-makers IN the house, making it too unpleasant for the thieves to remain in the house. CCTV that activates when the alarms are tripped can be handy, too.

ADT installs are terrible, their response times and attendances are terrible, they have no local knowledge (“There’s an alarm going off in activation in Ng… Nuh-Guhn-nawl?”), and they overcharge.
Its alot easier to deal with a local company who you have a better chance of dealing with over the phone, and may eventually meet you in the street somewhere.
We had a typical response time of ten minutes for much of Canberra, and could give you a fairly accurate ETA to within a few minutes at the time we were doing the “Do you want a response” spiel.

Oh, and the worst thing about all those false alarms in the early days was that it mostly pissed the neighbours off, and it became a ‘boy who cried wolf’ situation.

In a somewhat convenient turn-of-events all of our nearby neighbours have since been recycled, and i’ve got a fresh set of neighbours who will hopefully be more likely to pay attention when my array of noise-makers is enacted.

and get it monitored

I had a monitored alarm that was installed by a professional installer, and due to the incompetence of the installer we had a lot of false alarms in the early days.

On more than a few occasions the monitoring company (ADT) would phone me to say the alarm was going off. They would ask if i’d like a patrol sent out, to which I would mostly reply ‘YES’, and on more than a few occasions I arrived home before the patrol had turned up.

This would be a good 30-60 minutes after the alarm had triggered.

In other words, monitoring is mostly expensive and useless, unless you have a company that guarantees a rapid response.

I now have a quality alarm system (Ness) that uses dual-sensor technology (PIR/microwave) that all but eliminates false alarms (none in 3 years from the dual-tech sensors). This is hooked up to an array of noise-makers both inside and outside the house.

The windows are the key to preventing people from breaking into your house. Lock them properly, i.e. with a key if you can and use the balsa wood sticks to prevent them from being slid across.

Most common way to get in is break a hand sized hole in a back/side window, stick hand through and open window from inside.

Serial numbers and such are always handy but a lot of stuff just gets swapped for drugs asap so it’s not overly effective and preventing your laptops/cameras from being nicked.

Also, those people who collect thousands of “worthless” coins in large jars equalling hundreds of dollars, take them to the bank and cash them in! They are the first item to go with kids.

What the f*ck is an adult tricycle?

“red in colour with a large, white basket between the rear wheels” LOL!!!

In all seriousness though, I’m sorry it got stolen. You shouldn’t need to worry about your possessions when they are safely stored in your yard or home.

Also to the above, buy a decent alarm, have it installed professionally, and get it monitored ($1-2/day).
Otherwise they just annoy the neighbourhood, as only a small percentage of strangers will ever bother to check out a house in alarm.

Easy time for theives.. they know most places are loaded with expensive christmas presents.

Unfortunately you need to nail down everything these days to avoid having it stolen, and your kids will have to learn to lock things in the garage or house, they will get in anywhere if they can.

Most of it’s opportunistic morons, we’ve had our locked side gate forced twice in the past few months.. only for them to find a dog in their face and looks like they’ve gone “oh shit” and buggered off.

Buy a dog (one that isn’t the equivalent to a rat and look after it) and alarm up!

Also on the note of little shits.. the police actually found that they could cut down on the crime rate a while ago by actually patrolling! Picked up something like 160 kids late at night down south, pity the government still thinks 2 policemen is good enough for Canberra and won’t put any money into it besides to top up the numbers.