If you’ve never been the target of a break-in or burglary, the FBI says you’re a lucky person. Their logs of various nonviolent crimes say that a home is broken into and stolen from one time in every thirty seconds.

What that means to you is that a smart person is going to take a good long look at ways to secure your home against break-in. More and more today people are taking a hard look at home security and finding that something more than they have now might be a great idea.

Your home may well be in a neighborhood watch area, and that’s a positive deterrent but it’s not enough these days. Even rural areas are seeing more and more crime reported. Primarily this is because of the inherent ease with which a rural home may be broken into. There aren’t many witnesses in the rural areas.

If you share your home with a large number of other people it’s quite likely the best deterrent to a break-in because the home is rarely unoccupied. What if you don’t? What if, like the normal family, the kids are in school and you are your spouse are working in the daylight hours?

One solution for you might be an alarm system. Home alarms are available in two categories. They are indoor and outdoor, and while the properties and the ways they measure when to go off are different, they work pretty much the same way for both.

An indoor alarm measures when to go off by a door or window opening. They measure the means to go off by whether or not there is motion and activity. You have an indoor alarm panel that you set with a certain security code. When you enter the home you turn it off by using your code, and when you leave the home you enable the alarm system.

The outdoor system too works by detecting motion or movement near or around your home. These systems are generally set up to detect motion and illuminate the area immediately using floodlights or other lights. They generally check the size and weight of the thing that is causing the motion prior to setting off any kind of an alarm.