When you are beefing up your home’s security, don’t forget the garage door. According to the Department of Justice, in about one third of all residential burglaries the perpetrator gains access to the home through an unsecured outer door or garage door.
Burglars tend to look for easy targets and experts say that “hardening” your home by installing good locks and detection systems will generally cause a burglar to look elsewhere. Even delaying a burglar about four minutes is enough to make most burglars abandon the effort to enter your home.
Your garage door is no exception. By making it more difficult for a burglar to enter through the garage door, they are likely to give up and move to an easier target.
Older garage door openers are a weak point in many homes and offer easy access to criminals. Older garage door openers were equipped with remote controls that used a fixed code to operate the door. Criminals quickly learned how to defeat these security measures by using “code grabbers” or electronic devices that quickly transmit all possible codes.
New garage door openers have remote controls that are far more secure because they use rolling codes that prevent copying by criminals. They are also designed as miniature keyring devices that you take with your rather than leaving the opener clipped to the visor of your car. This prevents criminals from breaking into your car, stealing your remote control, and getting your address from the registration. While you are at work the criminal simply drives to your home, opens the garage door with the stolen remote control, and has all day to clean out your garage and your home. With a miniature keyring remote control, you keep the remote control with you and not in your car where criminals can get at it.
