Garage Security?

When I lived with my folks, I had a 63 Ford in high school. I would put a bolt in the garage rails so the door would not open (Might be a problem in an apartment). You could only come in through the house.

Some relatives of mine were recently robbed in a similar way. They accidentally left the garage door opener in a car they had left parked in the driveway. Some people went all through their neighborhood breaking into cars to see if they had openers inside, and when they found my relatives' opener, they went in the garage, into the house, took all the keys and whatever laptops and stuff were nearby, and left with all three cars.

Their opener has an option that it can only be opened with a typed code from outside, or the button inside. Less convenient, but more secure.

I imagine you could also add a switch between the opener and the power main, operable by a remote control (I'm sure there's something like this on the home automation market), giving you a sort of two-factor authentication, where you'd have to switch on the power to the opener before being able to activate it. Again, less convenient but more secure.

In either case, always keep spare keys in a secure location inside the house, and keep the door from the house to the garage locked.

^

Locking your car is also a way to protect yourself from theft (They could break windows, but I doubt thieves attack cars with little blinking lights on the dashboard.)

Life is too short to watch a video of your garage at work...

Leave nothing of value in the car. Make the sure the car is hard to steal - either because it's new enough to not start without the remote, or because you have a steering wheel lock on it.

Then don't lock the car. Would you rather they rifled the car, and left it undamaged? Or broke a window to find that you have left nothing of value inside?

snberk103 said:

Then don't lock the car. Would you rather they rifled the car, and left it undamaged? Or broke a window to find that you have left nothing of value inside?

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Or you could have several bumps and bruises on her.

Put a "Steal me, please!!" sign on the dash.

Don't leave the keys on the seat, or your insurance company might get suspicious.

(Oh, it's a KIA, which I love, but that love is not shared by car thieves.)

.JahJahwarrior. said:

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The real problem is the thousands of dollars of sports equipment that is easy to steal and easy to dump at pawn shops, not so much the car. The thieves seem anxious to take easy, small stuff.

Apartment protects itself from liability by having a page in the contract saying garages are for cars and only cars...

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Then invest the 300$ for the rolling code garage opener. Simple, you'll have peace of mind

.JahJahwarrior. said:

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5)

The real problem is the thousands of dollars of sports equipment that is easy to steal and easy to dump at pawn shops, not so much the car. The thieves seem anxious to take easy, small stuff.

Apartment protects itself from liability by having a page in the contract saying garages are for cars and only cars...

Click to expand...

Is this a garage that is common to all tenants, or does each tenant have their own garage and opener?

If it's a common garage, then if the landlord won't install the fancy opener thingy - then maybe the tenants could all chip in. Sucks for the tenant who moves out 'cause the new tenant gets the fancy shmancy opener for free.

If this is a garage exclusive for your use, install the fancy shmancy opener, but then take it with you (restoring the old opener in it's place) when you move.

Don't know if either of those are practical.

I'm glad I live in a community where we don't need to worry about such things. Many long-time residents here are very comfortable leaving their keys in the ignition.... regardless of whether they're at home or parked in town. I've still got the big city in me (a little bit) so I take the keys with me when I'm town... I even sometimes remember to lock the doors. At home I'm constantly forgetting to take the keys out of the car...

But I did come from city where car breakins were very common, so I know how you worry. No broken windows, but a couple of times the door lock was jimmied.

You should look into renters insurance, it does not cost me very much.

StvenH90 said:

You should look into renters insurance, it does not cost me very much.

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I was thinking the same, but if he's inner-city they just might laugh at him.

Most garage doors I've seen have knobs that allow you to lock the garage door. If you can change the lock on the knob or have access to the key, just lock the garage door. Done and done.

Having just had my apartment broken into last month while I was out of the country (and having lost around $4,000 worth of stuff), here are a few suggestions:

• Renters insurance. It's really cheap. I didn't have it.

• Basic, low cost Radio Shack door alarms. They don't do much of anything, but if a door is opened and something starts beeping or buzzing loudly, many criminals will ditch the scene.

• Fake video cameras with wires leading into mysterious places/holes. This won't fool the pros, but for $40, dumb ones will be scared away.

• Extra physical security. If there were latches or bolts that needed to be undone, they might not have taken the time to break in, as added time outside is added risk.

Suggestion!!

Hey!! why don't you try change your garage door you may use an automatic gates or a garage door opener so that it would be easy for you to place your car!!

Take the spark plug wires with you whenever you park the car.