Tips to Prevent Garage Break-Ins

Among residential burglaries, criminals gain access to a home through the garage  nine percent  of the time. With a few simple strategies, you can help deter criminals from accessing your home through this point of entry and reduce the risk of burglary. Here are some tips on how to prevent garage break-ins.

First, invest in a high-quality garage door. Should a criminal try to break the door with brute force, they’ll likely have a hard time manhandling a door that’s of sturdy materials and strong hardware. Even if they are eventually able to break the door and create an opening, they’ll have to spend more time getting in — which means a neighbor will be more likely to see the criminal.

Wood and steel garage doors are some of the sturdiest types of garage doors. Steel garage doors have two layers of steel, which will be very difficult to break through. Wood doors contain multiple plies (layers) of wood, which together form a strong door. Criminals won’t likely use a saw to cut the wood because it’d make noise, and they won’t often have the strength to break through the layers.

High-quality doors like these may cost more than some other types of garage doors, but they’ll more than pay for themselves if they prevent a break-in.

Automatic garage door openers are extremely convenient, but older models can be susceptible to code skimming. With the right tool, a criminal can get the access code of an older garage door opener in just a few seconds.

To prevent this from happening, upgrade to an automatic garage door opener that has Rolling Code technology built into it. Such openers will either say Rolling Code or SECURITY+ on them, and they can’t be hacked like older ones.

Rolling Code automatic garage door openers don’t prevent criminals from skimming codes, but they render codes useless after a single use. They rotate (or roll) through around 1 million possible codes, transmitting a different one each time you open and close the garage door. Thus, a stolen code is useless even if a criminal does steal it through a skimming tool.

Of course, you can prevent code stealing by only opening and closing your garage door manually. This has its own drawbacks, though. Because manually securing a garage door is less convenient, you may decide to not lock it one some days. Not locking the door is, obviously, less secure than having an automatic opener that locks the door every time.

Rather than keeping a garage door opener in your car, replace the standard clip-on opener with a keychain model. Keychain openers (with Rolling Code integrated) are readily available, and they leave your home’s garage a little less vulnerable.

Sometimes, criminals gain access to a garage by first breaking into a car in the driveway and then using the garage door opener in that car to open the garage door. 

If you remove the opener from your car and use only a keychain opener, this isn’t a risk. A criminal could steal your keychain, but they’d then likely have your front door key anyways — so the fact that they also have a garage door opener would be a moot point.

No matter how strong your door is and what type of automatic door opener you have, always deadbolt your garage door when you leave town for a prolonged period of time. Just as a deadbolt helps secure your front door, one can also better secure your garage door — and you can’t be too secure when you travel.

Most garage doors have a deadbolt that sits on the inside of the door and locks into the tracks. In the event that your door doesn’t have such a lock, you can either install one or place a padlock on the tracks. Be sure to disengage or unplug your garage door opener to prevent damaging anything if you forget to unlock the garage door when you return.

Many garage doors come with windows that add style and let in natural light. Windows also, however, make it easy for criminals to peer into your garage and see whether you have anything they want to steal.

To minimize the risk of a criminal looking in, obscure the view of any windows that your garage door has. You can use blinds or frosted glass to block the view.If you need a new steel or wood  garage door , contact Plano Overhead Garage Door.

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