Grid Down Security

Home security is a very serious issue if a major failure of the grid occurs and as one thing will lead to another and the grids all fail you are reliant upon one person; YOU and what you do next can often dictate your life literally as if you have something and someone else wants it they will try to steal it first, then potentially kill you for it.

Like many things in life there are expensive solutions and remember an expensive solution is merely a cheaper solution with someone’s profit on and many of the claimed expensive solutions rely upon something else, does your house alarm work if there is a power cut? Yes it has a back up battery you say, but what happens when that goes flat. It doesn’t work and is worthless.

Does this mean it’s back to basics: actually no as some technologies can be usefully used as they have improved massively and come down in price and with a little care and little effort you can build some systems yourself and even the simplest systems can deceive people with nefarious intentions.

Many people can last for around a week and exist on what they have in stock and after this things get more stringent as perhaps the gas goes, the water soon follows and they see essential resources disappearing and they see you with some and they want it and think they need it and these types of thinking are what cause issues. What is the solution? Don’t let them see it and it really is that simple as if they don’t see you with it then you don’t become a target or you delay becoming a target and they go elsewhere and that is your first layer of security. If you have a generator and there is little to no traffic about, no industry then the ambient noise is significantly reduced and if you have a petrol or diesel generator and you run it they or someone will hear it and your generator becomes a target and your fuel also becomes a target as people have cars or their own generators and need fuel, so eliminate two sources of theft in one go.

Decide what is essential and what is not in any outbuildings you have and you need to be mindful of things and be clear and concise and avoid the thought process of money as this is a massive mistake, if you have a car in the garage and no fuel to run it then it is worthless and worth nothing so it essentially has no value. If you have a freezer and are solar powered with multiple solar panels on your roof and battery storage to harness that electricity and you run nothing but a freezer full of food then your freezer does have a value as you can run it and switch it off for 3-4 hours and your food will stay frozen, then switch it on to ensure it is frozen. You need to do this with everything and if you cannot use it then its worthless and it really is that simple and you need to move everything worthless as far from your house as you can and if it is a garage for example and it gets broken into its not really a problem as nothing has a value in there. If people see what they cannot use then its junk to them also and remember word gets around and they tell others your garage has been broken into and its full of junk and the next thing is to remove anything flammable as this can be used to start a fire as fire destroys evidence.

Next is to plan your home and where things moved into your house will go and remember most houses have 2 doors and some more doors and many have emergency windows which open wide enough for you to get out of and get out of also means wide enough to get into and this will be a problem. With heavy items blocking a doorway you have reduced the means of egress and it you do this so you only have one door it means you only have to worry about that door and if you stack items around your home so people cannot see through windows or conservatories they cannot see what you have and haven’t got and if they cannot see it they are unlikely to speculatively break in on the off chance, they will so somewhere where they know they have it. Therefore secrecy is your next weapon and the next items to look for are items which can be used as weapons and the knife block sitting on the kitchen window sill is many good weapons as every knife can become a weapon and not a tool.
Speculative break ins can occur because of you and if you leave tools and possibly a ladder in your garage or shed as you have classed it as worthless it may be worth something to a thief as they can use the ladder and tools to break in upstairs in your home, or get onto the roof and lift tiles and cut roofing felt and get in from above. Think? Does this equipment have a value for you and if not follow it up with does it have value to a thief to allow them to break into your home as it is equipment on site and they don’t have to transport anything and run the risk of going equipped to steal should they be stopped by the police.

Security of energy is vital and this gives many options now as technology advances and many compact solar powered devices are now on the market and these range from small solar panels to recharge a battery/battery bank to solar powered battery chargers to recharge your rechargeable batteries in your devices. Energy security is crucial for torches and other lights as these play a crucial role in home security and in a grid down situation it means you can run your lighting in different rooms and if you have a lantern in one room you can switch it on and one in the room you have come out off, so you are using the same amount of lighting power, just moving it to different areas of your house.

Solar charging systems are fine as long as you use common sense and the first thing is NOT to put the solar panel inside, next to a window as most home and car windows have some sort of UV protection coating to prevent or limit the amount of UV radiation penetrating the glass and guess what your solar panels rely upon? Yes UV radiation. You therefore need the solar panel outside where it is directly exposed to the sun for the best charging capacity and in a house this would be through a top opener on a window where the solar panel can be clamped to part of the frame for the best charging capabilities and this means it must be waterproof. This would be for a house only as on a bungalow anyone can steal it as most people can reach that high and if someone sees you have power and they don’t they will want to steal it and in some cases they will try.
How much electricity do you actually need? If you read my guide to making lights from LED strip the 5M strip consumed 1.7 amps per 5 metre length which equates to 0.34 amps or 340 milliamps per metre so 3 metres uses 1.02 amps and this is what you need to supply to your battery on a daily basis to keep it charged fully or you can get a fairly standard 063 battery which is a popular car battery of 40 A/H for around £40 in the UK. This will give over 39 hours of light from a fully charged battery if you limit your lights to 6 lights with 0.5 metres of LED strip in them which is 6 rooms lit or just the essential rooms and possibly the stairs and if you switch off or unplug lights you don’t use the battery will last longer.

Don’t limit yourself to solar charging as vertical axis wind turbines produce less power but they produce it consistently and this is where they beat solar as these rely upon the sun or simply light and they may only charge for 12 hours per day while vertical axis turbines will work for 24 hours per day and plod along consistently.
You can mount a small vertical axis turbine to the side of most houses and even bungalows will be high enough to be out of reach to most people, and safe; but if you can afford a larger leisure battery it can be constantly charging and placed in the loft. As funds allow you can get a second battery of the same make and size and if you connect them positive to positive and negative to negative you will still have 12 volts output but at the combined amperage of both batteries.
Put this in simple terms and if you have a Smiths leisure battery of 100 amp rating at 12 volts you have 12 volts and 100 amps of power which is 1200 watts and if you add another Smiths battery of 100 amps and connect the original positive terminal to the positive terminal of your second battery positive terminal and do the same with your negative terminal you will still have 12 volts but at 200 amps or 2400 watts.

If your lights only take 1.7 amps per 5 metre length you can make more or brighter lights and with them all on it will only draw 1.7 amps, if you have all the lights on every night for 5 hours it will be 8.5 amps you draw from your battery daily it will give you 11 days of light without recharging the battery. If your wind turbine produced an average 1 amp hour for 24 hours you are more than replacing that 8.5 amps used with 24 amps if the batteries will take it.
This gives you scope or redundancy as you can get a 12 volt battery charger for your rechargeable cells for other lights and charge them up fully or perhaps charge a mobile phone or power bank, basically this gives you options and if you can afford a small vertical axis turbine it may be worth the investment.

One other small investment worth exploring are the small LED strings of outdoor lights as a number of strings strategically placed around your home may not give enough light to identify someone but they will surely tell you someone is there as they block out the lights as they walk or try to sneak past and they tell you which direction they are going.

Finally you make your presence felt by intermittently firing a tactical or high powered torch out of your windows and across your land and never get into a time routine with this as it will be noticed and if you become complacent and do this at 08.00pm every evening thieves will notice this and expect it and be ready for it.

If all else fails you could invest in a kinetic generator as these are generally pedal powered and produce various voltages of electricity and in either AC or DC depending on the application and if you have 12 volt batteries the 12 volt DC machine is what you need to charge them up and your installation is completely hidden inside your home.

Placing any internal lighting is critical as it needs to both light the room sufficiently and it needs to produce sufficient light to be seen through any curtains, blinds, or window coverings and placing your light on the window sill or even a radiator behind the curtains will be seen and be thought to have been done deliberately so thieves can see them. In your main living room they are best located at the same location as your main light and if not possible then place them as close to your original light as you can and as high as you can as mounting them lower on a back wall will see the light blocked every time someone walks past. If you leave the door open an amount of light will fall in the passage or next room and potentially light up any window in there. For stairs you can mount a light at the bottom and light any bottom window and potentially a passage up or if you have a top stairs window you can mount your light half way up the stairs and light both top and bottom windows, but with less light. If you have explored other options such as putting a water turbine in the stream that runs through your garden of have a secured generator which you can run for a couple of hours per day you have options of having your house alarm on and its back up battery charged if it is at mains voltage or with many house alarms you can tap the battery charging chip and supply 12 volts directly to it and it will keep your alarm battery charged.

With a secured electricity supply at 12 volts you have other options and this is to use security lights and most LED security lights have their LED’s driven by 12 volts, 20-25 volts, 30-36 volts or 50 volts and they do this by having an internal LED driver and this measures the resistance of the circuit and limits the voltage and current to the chip sets. This basically means the input voltage can be between 110 and 250 volts AC and the driver regulates this down to DC and the correct voltage and current; LED chip sets are not particularly voltage sensitive but the current is critical and while they may over volt the LED’s they control the supply current very accurately.

You also have the solar option if you cannot secure an electrical supply and these are the stand alone solar powered security lights which are fastened to a suitable surface and many come with a motion sensor which detect movement and switch them on and a timer controls the time they are on and switches them off again. They are basically a solar powered battery charger housed in a fancy shaped light with the solar panel on top and individual or LED chips facing down to light a front door or other outside area and as long as the LED panel is not obscured or shaded it charges the batteries and switches on when movement is detected.

If you aren’t bothered by the movement sensor and only have 12 volts you can use LED work lights as their driver chip is designed for 12v DC input to the LED driver so use these and switch them manually using a remote control system which generally comes as a 240V system but you can also get a 12 volt system. These come with a standard remote control fob and you switch on and you switch off and that’s it, they also come with a long range second fob and these can work up to 500 metres away from the remote control receiver and they have either a flap you lift or a cover you remove to get to the connections.
One side will be marked input and have a positive and negative connection clearly marked and you connect your battery cables to these and on the other side you will find the output side you will find both positive and negative connections for your light so connect these to your light and with some you may have to code them following the instructions to code them which is very easy. If you wish to connect two or more lights to come on at once you can either connect them both to the output side or you can connect the output side to a joint box which can be screwed to something such as wood or bricks with Rawplugs in and you get chocolate block you only need two pieces of 30 amp rated block as these are the largest and have the largest holes so you can fit multiple cables into one piece of chocolate block and run 3 or even 4 lights from your remote control.

What is their benefit? Actually it is their uncertainty as a standard sensor light switches on when it detects movement and an establishes criminal knows how to beat these lights and they regularly do, if they expect the light to come on when they get near they will find another way to your property. If you hear something and look out you may find it’s the local cats or foxes and decide to save your batteries you may not switch them on, but if you see people skulking near your property but not actually on it you may choose to switch them on and see them off and it’s this inconsistency which makes criminals think as they do watch and are very observant or in prison.

Understanding your property is critical as it needs as few hidden spots as possible and the usual spots are behind garages or sheds or other fixed things such as log piles of even screening or hedging, they all hide a thief and most thieves know it and utilise this knowledge to their benefit. If you have the slotted concrete posts with the slide in fence panels you have a criminals wet dream as they simply lift them up and put a block under them to keep them up and crawl under the panel and remove the block and lower it down again and if you look you never notice anything wrong so you need to lock these panels down. To do this you can drill the post at the BOTTOM and fix a metal bracket to the concrete post with a Rawlplug and screw and screw the bracket to the bottom stile of the fence and if you want a really strong job you can fix studding into the hole with chemical anchor and bolt your plate to the concrete post instead. Why the bottom? Because the smallest commercial fence panel is 3’ or 900mm high and if you fix it at the bottom a thief has got to have long arms to reach it and then unscrew it and it would be easier and much noisier to climb over it. It is the noise we want as unusual noises attract attention and it is your attention it is alerting you to an impending break in and you can flash your lights around and frighten any intruders off.

If you intend securing your property with gates it is important they aren’t solid so thieves cannot use them to hide behind as an open lattice gate people can see through are much better; if it is steel it is even better as they make a lot of noise if people try to climb over them and they cannot hide behind them so any neighbours can see them also. It is all about locking easily broken through fencing down so it cannot be lifted making it noisy for criminals as they will get through if they want to and the more noise they make the chances of people hearing them improves so they alert you.

Laying out your garden is equally important so any criminals make as much noise as possible and one quick and easy trick is to remove some path and lay gravel as this is noisy when you walk on it and if it is strategically placed so you have to walk on it you guarantee some noise which will alert you and you can take this further. Avoid straight paths and introduce a dog leg and in the dog leg place some bricks in an awkward pattern and if they miss the dog leg in the dark then they fall over the bricks or send the bricks skittling and this noise is yet another alert and one of the best noises is smashing glass so get some glass smashing.
If you have a hidden area you put some bricks or a concrete slab on the floor and hand some glass jars or bottles using some thin fishing line and form a trip wire with it and if someone breaks the trip wire in the dark a series of glass bottles or jars fall down and hit the bricks or slab and smash and if they are at different heights the smashing lasts longer and most criminal flee as breaking glass attracts attention.