How To Keep Your Home Office Safe And Secure In Your Absence

There are several key steps to keep your home office safe and secure in your absence. Traveling at any time of year always brings the worry of what happens to your home while you’re away. Leaving things to chance isn’t an option, as opportunist burglars are always on the lookout for soft targets. That’s why its more important than ever to secure your home against home invasion.

Thankfully, ensuring your home is anything but a soft target is getting easier all the time. The days of relying on nothing more than a rudimentary small business alarm system are (thankfully) long gone. Of course, the longer you plan on being away, the greater the importance of appropriately protecting your home. In all instances, each of the following comes highly recommended as a tried, tested and trusted home safety strategy. To help you protect your personal and corporate belongings, read on to learn how to keep your home office safe and secure in your absence.

Invest In Smart Security

Today’s most basic smart security devices would have been considered works of pure sci-fi just a few decades ago. Connected smart technology is transforming the way homeowners take care of their homes, with the added bonus of surprisingly straightforward installation. For example, cameras and sensors can be set up to track sounds or movement, resulting in instant notifications being sent to the user’s smartphone. At which point, a real-time video feed can be accessed from any location worldwide, along with a recording of whatever has taken place stored in the cloud.

Likewise, smart light switches – like the Evvr Zigbee 3.0 In-Wall Relay Switch – can be used to create custom lighting schedules for each room of the home. They can also be interacted with and controlled from remote locations, using the accompanying smartphone app. Perfect for giving the impression you’re at home, when you’re actually halfway around the world. Even something as simple as a smart doorbell can help you keep an eye on who’s visiting your home and what they’re up to. Again, with video/audio recording functionalities to keep a record of anything that takes place while you are away.

Never Advertise Your Absence

One of the best ways to keep your home safe while you are away is to not make it evident you’re away in the first place. It’s worth remembering is how word need only reach one unsavoury or ill-intentioned individual to put your home and its contents in jeopardy. Of course, informing one or two people you trust implicitly is important. You need at least a couple of people to know you’re away, so they can drop by on occasion to ensure all is well.

Not to mention, pick up mail, packages and newspapers from your porch, rather than allowing them to pile up and advertising your absence. Aside from these people, try to keep your plans to yourself. The tendency these days is to broadcast planned absences to the entire world on business social media. Which, for reasons that should be fairly obvious, often turns out to be a recipe for disaster.

Make Repairs And Technical Tweaks

Always remember that safeguarding your home while away isn’t exclusively about deterring intruders. It’s also about protecting your property from unfortunate eventualities like fire, flooding and so on. Take time out before your trip to conduct a detailed inspection of anything that could cause an issue in your absence. Dripping taps, plumbing leaky pipes, faulty smoke and CO₂ monitors, boilers in a poor state of repair – all potentially hazardous when left to their own devices. When planning a particularly extensive trip, it can be worth bringing in an expert to give your home a quick once-over. Ask friends, family members and colleagues to recommend an affordable local handyman you can trust.

Consider Buying A Backup Power Source

Last up, the one common flaw shared by all smart security devices is their reliance on electricity. Which subsequently means that if your home loses power, it loses its entire smart security framework. It may sound like a fairly extreme measure, but picking up an emergency backup generator can bring real peace of mind. It can also help you achieve a more energy efficient office. It can also be a surprisingly cost-effective investment, which at some point or another could prove to be a godsend. Remember that you don’t need an industrial-grade generator that’s capable of powering your entire home for days on end. You simply need something the right size to keep your home security up and running, in order to make it a less attractive prospect for potential burglars during a blackout.