Top tips for keeping your home secure while you’re on holiday

As Christmas is drawing closer, you’re likely thinking about visiting friends and family over the festive period. When we’re packing up and heading off, the last thing we want on our minds is whether our home is safe. Whilst you can’t guarantee complete safety, peace of mind can take a few simple steps. This article contains a few of our favourite ways to keep your home secure when you’re away.

The Basics

Before we get into the more time-consuming ways to increase home security, let’s go over the basics. Your windows and doors are the main entry point any burglary will try to enter through, so first and foremost make sure they’re locked. If you have spare door keys or window lock keys, ensure that these are kept well away from any entry point. Ideally, this should be in a lockable drawer.

Hide your valuables. Whilst valuable items on display won’t make it easier to enter your home, it will give someone trying to break in more of a reason to do so. This goes for anything you keep outside such as bikes or garden tools. If possible bring these indoors too.

Business as usual

Now onto a few more interesting ways to protect your homes. Most burglars will wait months before they even attempt to trespass, paying close attention to the activities happening within your household. So when you leave for a long period and that activity changes, they have a big green flag to make their move. You can get around this in a few ways. Invest in light timers, these allow you to set your lights to turn on and off at specific times, giving the impression your home is occupied. If possible ask a neighbour to park in your driveway, or directly outside your home whilst your away. Finally, you can ask a trusted family or neighbour to check on your house occasionally leaving your curtains open during the day and closing them at night. These tips are aimed at implying a home is occupied, try to think of your own ways of doing this and get creative with it.

Out of the Old in with the New

We’ve nailed the basics and even got creative with our security. In most cases, this is enough to ensure you can leave your home with confidence and enjoy your time away. Unfortunately, structurally unsound windows and doors make a well-equipped intruders task much simpler. The older your entry points, the less they do to prevent a determined thief.

If your windows or doors look like they’ve seen their best days, you can be sure that they’ll struggle to keep unsavoury characters out. On the other hand, just the sight of a brand new set of high-quality windows and doors can be enough to deter possible entrants, making them a worthwhile investment. If your house looks like Fort Knox, a burglar may not even bother.

Here at DGN one of our top priorities is to inspire confidence in household security. We partner with world-renowned companies to provide products to this end. If you are in need of new, more secure windows or doors, have look through our products.