Sure, you’ve given some thought to your interior alarm system… but have you considered the benefits to protecting the outside of your property as well, with motion sensor flood lights? Inside alarm systems are important for stopping hardened criminals in the middle of their crimes, but the weak point of that form of security is that the burglar is already inside, doing whatever he wants. Being quite logically paranoid by nature, many burglars can be scared off without ever having broken inside in the first place. It doesn’t even take an alarm or siren, just a simple bright spotlight revealing them and their misguided intentions to the world. And so motion sensor lights, while an additional expense, are very often an investment that is well worth the cost for keeping your property safe.
Most motion sensors for lights come packaged with one or two good-sized floodlights, and are intended to be mounted with those lights to get the widest overall view of the area. However, this doesn’t mean that you are limited to only the included lights! While it’s easiest, especially for people not great at electrical work, to just use what’s in the frequently pre-wired package, there’s usually nothing preventing you from hooking up additional lights to the system for extra protection. Imagine a thief all in black, creeping around your yard… then, flash, the lights turn on, and suddenly he’s got nowhere to hide! He could keep on with his planned misdeeds, but he’ll have to do them in full view. And the sudden brilliant lighting will more likely than not attract eyes to windows to see what’s going on. If YOU were a thief, you’d probably run, wouldn’t you? That’s the kind of security even one motion sensor light can provide, to stop crime before it even starts.
As with interior motion-based security systems, an outdoor lighting motion sensor is tweaked to only go off in very specific circumstances. It will ignore slow atmospheric heat changes, as well as small heat signatures generated by animals. Only when a person walks close will the lights flick on, making it a certainty that people will be clearly illuminated by your motion sensor security light while false positives are avoided.
Almost all of these systems will also let you turn the lights on manually. Need lights for a party in the evening? The security system can double as a lighting system for such benign purposes. If you were going to buy outdoor lights anyway, you may save a not insignificant amount of money by buying lights as part of an overall security package.
As a last consideration, for those of you who are particularly interested in cutting costs on electricity, there have been recent innovations in the area of solar-powered outdoor security systems. In the daytime, the systems will soak up the sun, and at night, they’ll convert that sunlight into security illumination. If you go this route, you’ll have to pay a little more for a quality solar-powered system, but you’ll more than make up the added expense in future savings. However, you should be careful to only buy a model that has gotten good customer reviews and is produced by a trusted company in the industry. Some models are so low-powered in lighting as to be essentially worthless, and it would be a waste of money to buy a product that doesn’t adequately protect your property.
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