House insurance and burglar alarms

[ARW]

Or

Leaving the dog access to a room that they said it would not be allowed into? Drunken teens arriving home at 3am and forgetting the code for the alarm?

:-) It happens.

[Bill]

In message , ARW writes

Not only drunken teenagers!

I arrived at work on Saturday to let a handyman in and opened the doors, walked to the alarm panel and my mind went totally blank. I just said to the guy, get out, it's about to get very noisy. Most embarrassing :-)

[ARW]

I once left too many internal doors open the same time when working in one house. That set the silent alarm off and the police arrived.

[dennis]

8<

I never make stuff up. You can go and find out which yourself, I don't intend to help you with more robberies.

[ARW]

Apart from geographical locations in Germany ?

[Andrew Gabriel]

When I've worked for small companies where the last one out has to set the alarm, I've seen the same thing happen 3 times...

2nd-last person in the office goes into the loo. Last person gets up to leave, realises there's no one else there, sets the alarm, and leaves. Other person comes out the loo, and all hell breaks loose... At one place, if that person wasn't a keyholder or had not taken their keys with them to the loo, they were now stuck locked in a hallway, and unable to get to the alarm to stop it. Just had to wait for the police and then a keyholder to come back.

Had a couple shortly after I'd fitted my alarm...

I was away in the US for a few weeks. Alarm goes off after a couple of weeks with movement detected in the living room. It turns out that a large pot plant (almost the height of the ceiling) used up the last trace of water in the soil, and the pot became too lightweight to keep the plant standing, so the whole thing fell over.

Another one was movement detected on the landing when I wasn't there. It happened a few times without me knowing what it was, until I correlated it with something else - it was always 15 minutes after I remoted switched the heating on. Turned out that the updraft from the downstairs hall radiator was causing the pendant light on the landing to start moving in the draft. Fixed it by swapping the pendant for a fixed chromed tube light mounting.

These are the sort of thing to get sorted before you enable the external sounder.

[alan]

Warm downstairs hallway and postman shoves a large number of cold letters through the letterbox. Most letters landed just behind front door, as usual, but some ended up half way down hallway and triggered the PIR fitted above the front door. I didn't realise that this was the cause until it happened a second time a short time later when a friend posted a box full of newsletters (300 off) and the alarm went off while he was doing so. [I was expecting the newsletters as I had to deliver them that night.]

[AndyW]

HTH

Andy

[Portsmouth Rider]

ISTR a film a few years go.

Plot ran on the lines... house owner lets it be known house will be empty - known scrote breaks in - and finds himself trapped behind electrically operated bars - momeowner hasn't actually gone away, spends holiday watching scrote plead and and starve to death behind the bars.

[Ophelia]

lol, love it!

[Ophelia]

That sounds like fun:)

[DrTeeth]

Deffo not worth getting an alarm. Any insurance discount is minimal.

I have heard that burglars look how easy it is to get OUT of a place rather than looking how easy it is to get in.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Quite. So deadlocking any final exit is a good idea. Someone going into a house via a window might just be the owner, having lost his keys, etc. Coming out of one, likely not.

[Cynic]

Then, after looking at the decapitated head, you realise it is your son who was sneaking back into the house in the small hours ...

[Jethro_uk]

When we leave the house we take the set of keys from *inside* the door, and use them to lock up. Thus rendering the front door locked with no key in the house.

Does this count ?

[Cynic]

Even if you are as strong and brave as you perhaps consider yourself to be, there is a reasonable chance that you will be grossly outmatched by 2 or 3 beefy burglars, or someone on PCP or a similar drug, so I really don't see why your advice should not apply to everyone.

It would surely be better to risk losing your TV set than to risk losing your life?

[Dave Plowman (News)]

But doesn't tell the world how macho you think you are.

[ARW]

This one?

[AndyW]

One of the "Tales of the Unexpected" TV 'plays' in the 70s IIRC.

Andy

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

Bad Munching?