It happened to me...

[DeLicious]

Well, how do I start? On Wednesday, April 11, and 1:18 PM, my back door was kicked in by a burgler. 1 minute later, HomeSeer sent an email to my cell phone indicating that the back door was open and unauthorized, and that there was movement in the kitchen and living room (my only sets of motion detectors so far). I was able to verify all this through the web interface, however, I was still a little skeptical since I had gotten one or two false alarms from the kitchen motion detector (but not the back door before).

I immediately called my wife and we decided to converge on the house together just to check it out. She got there first and called me. I asked her to peek in the back yard gate to see if the back door was open. It was. She ran. I called the police while I was still on my way and told them there were strange people in my house. When I arrived 5 minutes later, there was already 1 police car driving around, but being alone, he didn't go into the house. When several backup cars arrived, they surrounded the house, and police went in through the back, but the burglers had escaped by then, I assume out the back way while the lone policeman was in front.

They ransacked the place. Took a lot of my wife's jewelry, a lot of her designer handbags, a laptop computer, a digital video camera, my playstation, and my really nice watch. They had apparently attempted to take a tablet PC as well (how they didn't succeed, I don't know), as well as my 50" LCD TV which was lying in the middle of the living room floor.

Fortunately, nobody was hurt. My wife made it away ok, and my 2 year old daughter was at daycare. However, emotionally and mentally, I don't think I'll ever be the same. Kudos to HomeSeer for doing it's job, but really, I have little choice but to invest in more. Martin, expect a call from me on Friday.

Fellow cocooners, I know many of you are already secure, but for those of you who are not yet, please take the time and money necessary to secure your home and family. Don't get me wrong, they will get in if they want to, and there is little you can do to stop a determined criminal like this (especially when you are not home), but the more deterrents, the better.

Part of the irony here is that I was just a couple days away from buying and installing web cameras so that I could have checked on the house from my office, but they beat me to the punch.

 

[BraveSirRobbin]

I am so sorry this happened to you and your family, but I want to thank you for posting these details here so others can benefit from them!

My sincere regards,

BSR

 

[rfdesq]

Sorry for your losses and glad everyone is okay.

 

[acheslow]

Really sorry for you too; just glad that nobody got hurt. I still remember when I was 12 years old and my family's house was burglarized. They eventually caught the guy and his girlfriend months later -- miraculously he was pulled over for something else and still had a bunch of our stuff in his car. I hope these guys get busted too.

 

[IVB]

Sorry to hear that, it certainly is a violated feeling.

 

[technerd]

Wow that is a very disturbing story. I am glad your family is okay though!!

This is why I am switching from a regular POTS monitoring company to uControl - where it's monitored via telephone, broadband, and cellular. I have my neighbor who is a former Police Chief on my alert list if my alarm should go off, so he, myself, and my wife are contacted. If we're unreachable the monitoring center sends the police.

You can never be too careful when it comes to your most valuable thing - your loved ones.

I did a quick google on the HomeSeer system you mentioned - is that hard or expensive to set up? I went with uControl because it seems to offer that with minimal techie set up.

Anyway thanks for sharing the story and I hope they catch the crook(s) who broke into your house!!

 

[bfisher]

sorry to hear about your incident... glad no one was hurt

 

[GLT]

Well, I was hoping to say it was just kids - but unfortunately it doesn't really sound like it.

When my parents house was broken in to (MANY years ago) - the effect on the women was unimaginable - the stuff didn't matter, but the loss of security did. My sister seemed to get over it when she found out she would get NEW stuff via insurance. I don't know if Mom ever got over it.

They caught the guy, but not his boss (the planner), (they eventually did get the boss, just not on the burglary). The burglar should thank God for the courts, because my Dad would have been more than happy to handle the problem himself. (Funny thing - if they needed something from him - all they had to do was ask.)

Many people never suffer a burglary, but once is a good warning. The job now is to restore the feeling of security. Move if necessary. Otherwise, go with the best system possible. Damn the expense. Explain clearly to all involved why your system is better than the neighbors. Martin can surely help.

Sorry to hear it, and sorry to pontificate, but restoring security to your home now is essential, and time is of the essence.

Good luck,

GLT

 

[electron]

Wow that is a very disturbing story. I am glad your family is okay though!!

This is why I am switching from a regular POTS monitoring company to uControl - where it's monitored via telephone, broadband, and cellular. I have my neighbor who is a former Police Chief on my alert list if my alarm should go off, so he, myself, and my wife are contacted. If we're unreachable the monitoring center sends the police.

You can never be too careful when it comes to your most valuable thing - your loved ones.

I did a quick google on the HomeSeer system you mentioned - is that hard or expensive to set up? I went with uControl because it seems to offer that with minimal techie set up.

Anyway thanks for sharing the story and I hope they catch the crook(s) who broke into your house!!

All Homeseer did in this case is send out an e-mail, which is something you can do with the M1 as well (assuming you have the M1 XEP interface).

DeLicious, glad to hear everyone is ok, you are right that you can't stop all criminals, but the fact that you KNOW someone is in your house before you arrive is priceless. Things could have gotten ugly if you (or your wife) entered the house while they were still there and you didn't know in advance.

As for the laptop, start checking eBay on a regular basis, and if you have any software on there that phones home when the laptop is turned on (maybe something like DynDNS, AOL IM, or some other updater program), then I would try to keep track of that as well.

 

[Kevin L]

I'm very sorry you suffered this loss. Fortunately, the loss is only monetary and a loss of feeling secure. I've never had a security system, but will be installing one (Elk MK1G) in the home we're building now.

I'm a little puzzled why you didn't call the police right away, choosing instead to put you and your family in the middle of an unknown and potentially dangerous situation. Had you called right away, perhaps the police would have apprehended the burglar(s) sooner, or at least scared them away. If it's concern for being fined for a false alarm, haven't you rendered useless much of the value of a security system by not trusting it? I'd rather take the chance of paying a fine over losing a loved one. I know you received a couple of false reports of motion in the kitchen, and I'd likely not respond to that, too, since how would there be someone in the home if there wasn't an indication of entry. In this case, though, you received two alerts that someone was in the house. That would have convinced me enough that I need to call the police right away.

One last item, if you're spending all this money on security and monitoring, why wouldn't you have the system centrally-monitored? The $25 or $30 a month is not a lot considering the added security, and the discount on your homeowners insurance could offset some or all of this fee.

Am I off-base on my reasoning?

Best regards,

Kevin

 

[Digger]

One last item, if you're spending all this money on security and monitoring, why wouldn't you have the system centrally-monitored? The $25 or $30 a month is not a lot considering the added security, and the discount on your homeowners insurance could offset some or all of this fee.

Many DIY's wait a few months or so to make sure the system is stable before connecting to a Central Station. False alarms can occur until you get the bugs out even in a professional installation but they dont want the liability of waiting.

There was an article in our local paper this week where the one county wanted to fine a homeowner, the installer, and the central station for false alarms (it would generate MILLIONS). If the residence did not have a permit for the alarm the fines to all three would be higher. The county police were quoted as saying that of the approx 115,000 alarm responses last year 99.4 percent were false alarms. This makes the police response time longer and the officers more at risk as well as costing the taxpayers a fortune.

There are systems out there that minimize false alarms tremendously and ANSI/SIA CP-01 requirements as well that are now required to be met in many locations. No matter what there will always be false alarms though. The odds of an alarm being the "real deal" on a new install are low but there is always that chance.

 

[Kevin L]

Thanks, Digger.

I realize the DIY community is a different type of customer. Doing self-installs is a learning process (at least for me), and that mistakes will likely be made. My feeling about the alarm system, though, is to get it up and running reliably as a an alerting device to the central station company first, and then start adding some of the additional monitoring like cameras, e-mail alerting, etc. It seems foolish to put in an alarm/monitoring system and not trust it to do its job. If there is a false alarm and you have to pay a fine, then pay it and find out why the false alarm triggered. Waiting to verify whether an alarm is real or not before notifying the authorities greatly diminishes the value of having the system at all. Putting yourself in danger to make sure is even worse. And I'd never ask my wife to go check it out. I'd rather risk the fine than her life.

If one wants to make sure the alarm is real, then installing cameras should be a priority. If you can't afford the cameras or haven't gotten around to doing them yet, then trust the alarm (especially if two different sensors triggered alerts) and call the police.

I don't mean to sound harsh to DeLicious. I really sympathize when these things happen to innocent people. I've been an insurance agent for 30 years and have paid out many claims for burglary. I'd rather keep paying for lost property than have to pay out a life insurance claim because something went terribly wrong when a client tried to do the job of the police.

Thanks for listening,

Kevin

 

[HoustonFirefox]

I am sorry to hear about your loss as well and am just glad that your family is ok.

Insofar as the false alarms are concerned, the motion detectors could be discounted but if I received an alert that the back door was unsecure, THEN the motion detectors going off, then I would have called the police immediately.

I had a motorcycle stolen from my garage about two years ago. I installed a motion detector in the garage that same day. Yep, you guessed it. The same bastards came back the following day while I was at work and tried to get the second motorcycle.

My Elk M1G emailed both me at work and my cell phone indicating that the garage had motion. The interior alarm and exterior strobe light went off which alerted my neighbor (who was mowing his yard at the time... he also knew about the break-in the previous day).

The neighbor called the police and wrote down the license number of the U-Haul truck they were driving and I immediately called our neighborhood patrol (manned by off-duty Houston Police Dept officers) and they raced to the house and blocked the exit of the goofball and his accomplices trying to get away.

You can imagine that 12 police cars and full felony-stop procedures in a neighborhood will definitely get everyones attention.

To make a long story short(er), it turned out that these slimeballs were part of a 12 person team that had been targeting garages in the neighborhood for months. I recovered my stolen motorcycle and many of my neighbors retrieved belongings as well.

The perps were sentenced to 15 years (for the number of robberies) and a local motorcycle dealer got 8 years for buying the (obviously) stolen motorcycles.

All in all, my less-than-$1000 Elk M1G was responsible for recovering over $612,000 in stolen property and put some meth-buying slime in prison for a long time. They definitely picked the wrong house to mess with.

How did they get into the garage you ask? Simple, they used a long stiff wire to reach under the door and hook the emergency rope release on the garage door opener; a simple tug and they were in.

A piece of advise here, CUT OFF THE HANDLE on the emergency release and leave the end of the rope hanging free. You will still be able to open the door if the power fails but the thieves won't be able to "hook" it.

I've since installed a garage-door magnetic sensors so even opening the doors would have set off the alarm before the motion-detector picked anything up.

Hope my experience (as well as Delicious's) can help someone in the future.

Elk Rules! (pun intended)

HoustonFirefox

 

[DeLicious]

First of all, thanks to everyone for the kind words. I appreciate how supportive this community is.

Kevin, I'm pretty much agreeing with you on everything. I realize now I should never have put my wife in that situation and it would have been unlikely to get false alarms from 3 different sensors. That being said, it's not a real security system. It was just a couple of motion sensors (mainly for automated lighting) that I thought would be useful while we were out of the house too, as well as some door sensors. There was no way I was going to get that centrally monitored.

Installing cameras was a priority, and I was in the middle of researching (and about a week to two weeks away from purchasing) cameras. But being young (you've been in the business 30 years... I haven't even been alive 30 years) and new to both home ownership (just moved in a year ago) and automation/security (only since last August), these type of things don't just pop into my head.

What is going to happen is that I will be installing cameras this weekend to supplement my current HomeSeer system, as rudimentary as it is. Once that is in place, I can start planning for an actual security system, but these things don't happen overnight, especially on a limited budget. Some of us just can't afford to go to Automated Outlet and buy everything we need all at once.

Again, thanks for all the kind words. I know, in general, the situation was handled rather poorly on my end, and I will certainly use it as a learning experience, as I hope everyone will. And that was really the thrust of my original post. I hope everyone uses this as a learning experience. Don't wait for it to happen to you. Get everything you can done as early as possible, and make it a priority rather than just a hobby as I had done.

 

[Kevin L]

Hi, DeLicious.

I'm glad you took my posts in the spirit they were intended. Sometimes the tone of the message doesn't come across in forums. Again, I'm very glad you or your wife weren't hurt and that you (and others) can use this as a learning experience.

Some 32 years ago when I bought my first home it was broken into. At the time, I couldn't afford an alarm system, and somehow through the years I've never added one to any of the homes I've owned. Our next home is different since it's brand new and easy to install wiring and contacts. Plus, we'll be travelling more often and I will feel better having the security.

I will tell you that the feeling of being violated does go away in time. I hope this experience will not make you or your wife feel uncomfortable living in your home. It's a damn shame when that happens. Your home is one place you should always be able to feel safe.

Best regards,

Kevin