Do burglars ever break the glass in a sliding glass door, thermopane fwiw, to get into a house? I've never heard of it, but the news gives few details about how house perimeters are actually breached.
(I have to go away and I'm having trouble with my glass breakage detector)
They usually just lift them off the track or defeat the flimsy lock. The way to avoid that is to put a strip of wood above the door after it is seated in the track so it can't be lifted. A wind code door will have another material installed that does the same thing but looks better or the inner track will have a removable section that you replace after the door is installed and there is no big gap above the door (My Andersens do that). You solve the lock problem with a "charley bar" that prevents the door from sliding or by pinning the door to the track from the inside.
Breaking the glass still works unless you have impact glass. My exterior sliders have tempered glass with plastic membranes in there that make it very hard to penetrate. They are tested by shooting 2x4s out of air cannons. Each panel weighs 280 pounds.
I have a broom stick above the door so it can't be lifted much. The lock is flimsy. Actually there is no lock, just a plug. I removed the plug once to get in the house and I filled the hole with more stuff, but it's still the weak spot. Would I be better off if I replaced the plug with key lock? Is that what you called flimsy, and what you said they would defeat?
I wish the crime reports would say exactly how they got in so I could take precautions against just that, that which the *local* burglars were using. In 39 years, we have had a few individual burglaries but we had two or three strings of them. I know they caught one of them, coming out of the house carrying loot, and I think they caught another one.
I have a piece of heavy conduit in the door channel. Maybe I'd be better off with something that can be seen from the outside.
I used to have a switch that set off the alarm when they opened the door more than 6", but I checked today, and I might have had mice in my long window box, for plants. It was sitting on the floor and the plants had died but there appears to be a hole in the ground and a lot of dirt on the carpet and in the door channel.
Now the roller plunger switch in the channel didn't go down easily and didn't come up at all! So I didn't connect the wire for that zone. But I want to fix it. I looked all over the web and they still sell roller plunger switches where the roller is perpendicular to the long axis of the switch plate, but no longer have the ones where it is in the same line. I think that's very strange. I guess the first was used for closet doors and the second was only used for sliding glass door channels and only by people like me.
But they do have switches with balls instead of wheels and they will work in any direction.
Sounds like fun.
I had two extra hours I didn't expect and after staring at the panel adn the wires for a while, I remembered why 11 years ago I didn't finish the glass/wood breakage detector. (had to solder the wire to a 3.6K resistor) And I finished in 30 minutes, before the alarm company man got here. I didnt' mess up any zones while trying to add more, which I've done before and I was afraid of.
So even if they do break the glass the alarm will go off. **
For another zone, I didn't notice that one of the included resistors is only 2200ohms (red,red,red) (and about 20 that are 5600, green, blue, red). When I used the right resistor, it worked. Amazing.
**Not that it's very dangerous here. In the last 11 years, I've been a way for 8 weeks, 11 weeks, and 3 weeks, and I had no alarm then, and nothing at all happened. But I figure I'm due.
Bullshit. Kids drive around shooting out tempered glass windows in cars all the time and the glass in a regular slider is thinner than a car window. Now if this is an impact door, it won't shatter, no matter what you shoot it with. You might poke a hole in it but the glass will still be there, held by the membrane.
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