Our next home security seminar will be held on Tuesday, January 13th in our Kerrisdale Showroom … please come by around 6:45pm for some wine and cheese… the presentation will begin at 7:00pm.

Click here to read some comments from past attendees.

Every seminar that we have held over the past few months has sold out early… although it’s free to attend, we do have limited space.

If you’d like to attend, please click here to RSVP.

Gillian Shaw‘s latest blog post talks about how weak most people’s computer passwords are (Click here to read her post). A good reminder to change your computer, banking and other passwords…

Speaking of which, how many people know your alarm code? If the answer is more than just you… you should change that as well.

Click here to read a post from this blog discussing the importance of every user having their own alarm code as well as about using a duress or panic code.

Click below to watch the clip from today’s Living Vancouver segment on CBC where I talk about how just about every residential burglary happens.

One of the key points of the clip is the fact that the value of a monitored alarm system can only be realized after you’ve already taken a number of simple physical security measures such as locking your gates, installing double sided locks and five minute proofing.

The mistake that a lot of people make is thinking that home security is as simple as finding the cheapest alarm provider they can find and assuming that that’ll be enough.

I was interviewed for a story about home security… and specifically about how to prevent becoming the victim of a burglary… for Living Vancouver on CBC.

The segment will air today on Channel 3 at 3:00pm… It will also be available on Living Vancouver’s website

The city of Vancouver electrical code requires that every home has 120 volt smoke detectors installed before an Occupancy Permit will be issued. As a result, electricians will always install these ‘regular’ detectors in order to meet the code. Often, homeowners assume that those smoke detectors are being monitored by their alarm system… they rarely are.

Unfortunately, the city code does not yet recognize the superiority of having monitored, low voltage smoke detectors installed in your home.

What’s the difference between a ‘regular’ smoke detector and a monitored, low-voltage version?

Some of the advantages of a monitored, low-voltage smoke detector include:

• They are monitored through the alarm system… in the event of a fire (or the presence of smoke), we’ll know about it within seconds (even faster if you have BLINK);
• Because they are monitored through the alarm, a signal is sent to us to indicate that a detector has lost power or is using a back-up battery;
• the ability to pinpoint exactly which detector is in alarm;

By contrast, when the regular 120 volt detectors trip, they just make a noise… and if the power goes out, they will only last as long as the battery that you’ve installed in it (assuming it works).

This is why you often see homes with two smoke detectors side-by-side (like the photo below)… one is to meet the city electrical code… and one that is connected to the alarm system (either hardwired or wireless).

120Volt Smoke Detectors can be monitored… but are not the best way to go

While devices exist that allow us to connect your alarm to the 120 volt smoke detectors, we find that this practice invariably causes confusion later on… not the least of which is the fact that when any smoke detector in the house trips, all we know is that a fire alarm has tripped, not the exact location, or which specific detector, tripped. This is because 120 Volt detectors are ‘daisy-chained’ when wired… meaning that each detector is connected to a single cable. With low voltage detectors, each device is wired directly to the panel (or sends a wireless signal to the panel) without any ‘sharing’.

Daisy chain wiring creates a lot of frustration and wasted time for clients, the Fire Department and our Technicians when we are trying to troubleshoot why an alarm occurred … because all we know is that there was an alarm, but not the specific location from where it originated.

By contrast, with monitored low voltage detectors, we know immediately that an alarm is coming from the master bedroom smoke detector, or the basement electrical room or the garage, or wherever… giving the Fire Department much better information while they are en-route to your home.

False Alarm Issues

Because one of the most common reasons for smoke detectors tripping is burning something in the kitchen, clients invariably end up disconnecting the 120 volt smoke detector closest to the kitchen.

For this reason, we recommend that those ‘regular’ smoke detectors NOT be connected to the alarm. Instead, we install low voltage smoke detectors, designed to be remotely monitored, outside of each bedroom and in the basement… never anywhere near the kitchen.

Another advantage of low-voltage smoke detectors over the 120 volt ones is aesthetics. In many new residential projects, we are installing a flush-mount detector. The photo below shows one installed in our Kerrisdale showroom. While it is several times as expensive as a regular detector, it is the only flush mounted design that I have seen that really works.

The photo isn’t great, but it shows the smoke detector in the top right corner along with a small pot light and a ceiling mounted motion detector. Please feel free to stop by our showroom at 2309 West 41st Avenue if you would like to see how it looks installed.

What should you do?

1. Determine if your existing smoke detectors are monitored or not (call your alarm company and ask);

2. If your smoke detectors are more than 3 years old, consider having them replaced… if they are more than 5 years old, definitely have them replaced;

3. If you only have 120 Volt smoke detectors installed, consider having monitored low voltage smoke detectors added to your system (they can be either hardwired or wireless).

Both myself and Constable Ray Gardner of the Vancouver Police Department will be leading a home security seminar on Tuesday, September 23rd at 7:00pm.

The seminar covers, with lots of pictures, exactly how burglaries occur on Vancouver’s Westside. More importantly, we will show you exactly what you can do (both high and low tech) to ensure that you minimize your risk of becoming a victim.

The seminar will be held in our Kerrisdale showroom (click here to see what it looks like) where we have almost every conceivable home security device installed and ready to demonstrate that you can have high security without ruining the look of your home…

If you are interested in attending, please let us know via email at seminar@providentsecurity.bc.ca

We will also be offering brief tours of our state of the art Operations Centre… we will show you where all Provident alarm signals are received and automatically dispatched, how we can guarantee our five minute response time as well as show you how our unique BLINK monitoring service works.

Whether you are a Provident client or not, you will leave the seminar with specific ideas that you can implement immediately in order to improve your security.

Our showroom is located at 2309 West 41st Avenue… which is at 41st and Vine Street.

Click on the link below to watch an excerpt from a seminar held at the Arbutus Club last April where I discuss the concept of five minute proofing… and why it is the most important & effective security tactic (that often doesn’t cost anything to implement).

Please let us know if you would like to attend the seminar on Tuesday.

Alarms are not a deterrent

Fifteen years ago, if you were the only home on the street with an alarm… that would have been a deterrent. It was very unlikely that a burglar would choose to break-in to the only alarmed house on the street. Now, certainly in Vancouver, homes without alarms are the exception rather than the rule… market saturation has defeated the deterrent value of an alarm. Crooks have realized, for many of the reasons below, that most alarms do not provide any real level of security… the alarm trips and then nothing happens… so they break-in anyways. Click here to read more about why alarms are not a deterrent.

All-in-one systems… “none of the security, all of the monthly fee”

Just about every single “alarm system” that is sold ‘for free’, or in exchange for ‘putting a lawn sign in your front yard’, is worth exactly what you paid for it. Almost all of these alarms are of the ‘all-in-one’ variety… whereby the control panel, keypad, siren, telephone line connection and power supply are integrated into one unit (like the one pictured left).

The major challenge with these systems is that you, as the authorized user, need to be given time to open your door and get to the keypad to type in your disarm code. If you belong on site, that’s exactly what you do… if you are a burglar, you simply follow the sound of the beeping keypad and rip the entire thing off the wall before the alarm trips. Click here to read about why millions of alarms are completely useless.

No (or slow) response

The only reason for an alarm is to generate an immediate response. However, in the vast majority of North American cities, the Police either do not provide response at all or only respond after a burglary has been confirmed. There are lots of really good reasons why the Police won’t go… but none that explain why alarm companies think they should be paid for providing an incomplete service. Click here to read more about how response works.

Delay time / Keypad placement

Most home alarms cannot distinguish between your front door being opened by you with a key, or a crook with a crowbar… all it knows is that the door has been opened. Any delay time that your system is programmed to allow you to get to the keypad to disarm the system is ‘gifted’ time to a burglar. Most alarms have 30, 45, 60 or even 90 second delays! Keypads should be as close to the door as possible, with a maximum delay time of 10 seconds. Click here to read more about delay times.

Detecting the entry, not the break

The vast majority of alarms rely on motion detectors as the primary detection device. All of the effort to break into your house, or business, happens when the crook is still standing outside doing the ‘break’ part of ‘break and enter’. By the time they are inside, it’s almost guaranteed to be too late to start the alarm detection process. An effective alarm detects the BREAK, not just the enter. Click here to read how to ensure your alarm is detecting a burglar before they are already inside your house.

The Security Industry assumption is that all alarms are false until proven otherwise

What happens when your alarm trips? Most likely, your alarm company calls you. Why? Because they know that 98% of all alarms are false…. and that 70% of those are the result of user error. The problem is, you’re not paying a monthly security fee for the 98% false alarms… you’re paying so that, in the event of an actual burglary, someone will treat it like an emergency and actually do something about it. The real problem is that the alarm industry, for the most part, sells an incomplete service… they charge you a monthly fee to do the easy part, receiving a signal. The real trick is to be able to do something about that signal once received… Click here to read about how most of the alarm industry sells an incomplete service that isn’t worth paying for…

Enhanced Call Verification

As if the fact that your alarm company calls your home first after an alarm wasn’t bad enough, many security companies are embracing “Enhanced Call Verification” , or ECV, as the savior for the false alarm challenge. With ECV, rather than just calling your house as it is being broken into, they will also try to reach you on your cell phone. The only thing that ECV enhances is a burglars comfort level… with ECV a thief has even more time to spend in your house before anything ever gets done about it. Click here to read about why there is nothing ‘enhanced’ about ECV…

Exclusive reliance on a single form of communication

Phone lines are the achilles heal of any alarm system. You can spend thousands of dollars on a sophisticated alarm that takes every piece of advice on this blog into account, but if the only method of communication is your phone line, a crook can simply cut it from outside of your home… rendering the whole thing useless. Your security is in your redundancy… cellular back-up or BLINK mesh radio monitoring eliminates the most glaring single point of failure in your alarm. Click here to learn more about BLINK…

Sharing codes

One of the values that a properly designed alarm can offer is being able to track exactly who armed, disarmed or bypassed a zone, and when they did it. Almost every system available today has the capacity for dozens of user codes. Sharing codes eliminates the ability to confirm who did what and when (which is normally the first thing that gets checked when something bad happens). Every individual user of your alarm should have their own unique disarm code. However, in the race to cut costs as much as possible, most alarm monitoring stations do not even monitor for ‘opens and closes’ to cut down on signal traffic… meaning that your alarm could be offline for years and noone will learn that until after a burglary and people are wondering why the alarm never tripped. Click here to read about why user codes should be individually assigned…

Cross zoning

While assigning multiple devices to the same zone saves money during the initial installation, and makes things a lot simpler for an installer, it does so at the risk of limiting the security value an alarm can offer. Even if an alarm is not monitored, knowing that an alarm was tripped at the Living Room East Window rather than any of the windows on the main floor, makes a huge difference. Not only does it save time and money should servicing ever be required, it ensures that you, and anyone who is responding, knows exactly where to respond (or if you are in the house, where to stay away from until help arrives). Click here for more information about why your alarm should not share.

Click on the video below to watch CCTV footage from a residential burglary in Southlands last week.

Other than the fact that this burglary occurred on a Sunday afternoon, the balance of it occurs exactly as I’ve described in my post about the typical residential burglary…

When you watch the video, notice how much time was spent by the crooks before actually kicking in the front door. The first of the three crooks goes to the front door and rings the bell a few times, knocks on the door and then looks through a few windows before going back to the car to let the other two know that the house is empty.

All three burglars put on gloves and walk together to the front door, again checking through the windows.

The front door gets kicked in on the first try and they all run into the house.

Luckily, in this case, the burglars did not get anything of value in the home because other security measures had been taken to slow them down once inside.

You can also see several people walking and jogging past the house just as the burglars are making their getaway.

There were at least three burglaries in Southlands on the 25th… most likely by these same three guys. If you recognize anyone in the video, please give us a call at 604.664.1087 or call the VPD at 604.717.3321

This video is a good reminder of the fact that there isn’t much that you can do to make it physically impossible to break-in. If someone really wants to get in, they can. The most important security consideration is to five minute proof your home and belongings so that, in the event that someone does try to get in, it will take them at least five minutes (from the time the alarm first sounds) to get their hands on what you are trying to protect.

We cover the exact play-by-play of burglaries in our home security seminars. Understanding exactly how burglaries occur is one of the very best ways to reduce your risk of loss. If you would like to register, click here to send us an email. ***UPDATE*** click here to sign up for our next seminar

Here are a few still frames of the three burglars in the video… please forward this post on to anyone who think might recognize one, or all, of them.

We have a few spots left for our next home security seminar which will be held on Wednesday, May 28th at 7:00pm.

The seminar covers, with lots of pictures, exactly how burglaries occur on Vancouver’s Westside. More importantly, we will show you exactly what you can do (both high and low tech) to ensure that you minimize your risk of becoming a victim.

The seminar will be held in our new Kerrisdale showroom (click here to see what it looks like) where we have almost every conceivable home security device installed and ready to demonstrate that you can have high security without ruining the look of your home…

If you are interested in attending, please let us know via email at seminar@providentsecurity.bc.ca

We will also be offering brief tours of our state of the art Operations Centre… we will show you where all Provident alarm signals are received and automatically dispatched, how we can guarantee our five minute response time as well as show you how our unique BLINK monitoring service works.

Our showroom is located at 2309 West 41st Avenue…. which is at 41st and Vine Street.

I’ve written about how ‘five minute proofing’ is the most effective tactic that can be used to reduce your risk of loss in a burglary in several posts.

Here is an excerpt from a recent home security seminar where I spoke about how you can apply some specific five minute proofing strategies in your home. The lighting isn’t very good… but you’ll get the idea.

This video was filmed a couple weeks ago at the Arbutus Club where I spoke, along with Constable Ray Gardner of the Vancouver Police Department, for about an hour and a half about how burglaries actually happen, how alarms work, why most alarms are completely useless… but most importantly, what you can do about it.

We have a few more seminars scheduled over the next few months. The next one that is open to anyone will be held on Wednesday, May 28th at 7:00pm in the Provident showroom in Kerrisdale. I’ll post more information about it soon, but if you would like to register to attend, please send us an email to reserve a spot.