Earlier today someone got into my garage and stole my Kemppi TIG welder. So I was just wondering what sort of locks and security solutions you guys have in your garages and workshops?
I'm considering setting up some cameras that are connected to my phone. But I also need better doors and locks to be fair, I've been putting it off for a long time now, partially because I've needed the money for other stuff and partially because I've considered making the place a little deeper and wider, thus I might want a slighly wider port as well. Fuck getting stuff taken from one tho, I've been spaced out all day now and haven't gotten anything done, really creeps me out.
The truth is all security measures are just for your own feeling of safety.
A determined thief can pick your locks and be in and out before you know it, a camera just lets you watch. Best protection is either living in a better area or having a guard dog.
William Torres
Make sure your walk in door is a real door that sits on a real frame. If not, reinforce the fuck of the frame, and the door, and where the lock sits. Use security hinges, and a deadbolt.
Any windows should be bared, or small enough that no one can crawl in.
3rdly, your emergency garage opener rope thing can be reached from the outside, take it, and either wrap it off, or tie it off with a zip tie.
Michael Price
Yea, if someone wants in somewhere it's somewhat hopeless I guess, 5 minutes with a power cutter and one is through most of everything. Can't really do a guard dog or move tho. I don't really live next to the garage but I live and always work really close to it, so I was thinking I'd have a chance of getting into my car and follow any intruder, or possibly catch their plate.
Thx for the tips, got a couple of large windows that needs barring. The port is of a different type so it's probably ok (pic related)
Chase Parker
Best protection is to have something really, really fucking crazy on your lawn or close to your garage.
>put up a sign >Hi there, I was abused in high school and I'm white. If you steal from me, I will burn down this entire city just to make sure. Thanks for your time.
Adrian Mitchell
Describe your garage, how they got in, and ways that you would try to break in if you could.
Kevin Phillips
kek
It's in the picture above. They just crowbarred the door on the left. Since they did this in broad daylight they probably pretended to have some business upon coming here, had I been on the premise they'd probably ask if I wanted to buy some paintings or whatever. They walk around on the property for a while, pretending to look for someone, if they see noone's around they take the opportunity to grab something and drive on, I would probably do the same. This is out on the countryside so there's no neighbours or anything to watch out for. I've got a house with a tenant next to the garage but she's 76 years old and not so well right now so she spends most of the day resting, there's a lot of "regular" people who have business there too so she would just think it's some friend who came to borrow something or whatever anyway.
If the locks were more solid I'd probably just go there in some junk car late at night, ram the port, quickly fill up the trunk with stuff and drive off.
Jonathan Butler
>Garage security?
I don't let people know my power level. So they don't know what I have in the garage. The area is fenced and signs say NO SOLICITORS. I have area scanners that turn on lights and sound a small beep in the house.
A lot of those wireless alarms are convenient to install. They have area scanners that work in the daytime too. In order to prosecute in today's stupid legal climate, you need no trespassing signs and fencing. Otherwise they use the DINDU defense even if they are inside your garage when you catch them. After all the door was open so they walked in to see if anyone there. DINDU.
If you go to places like Sam's Club (and presumably Costco), they sell multiple camera systems along with a digital recorder. The price is not too much about $299.
Landon Cook
>Describe your garage, how they got in, and ways that you would try to break in if you could.
Not OP, but homeless people will use a crowbar to poke a hole in a wooden garage door. Then they quickly yank out one panel. Now they have entry. They all wear hoodies and a baseball cap with those dollar store sunglasses, so you cannot really get much of an ID on them. They are a plague here so neighbors formed a watch group and watch out for everyone.
Get a nice cheap boxed set of wireless alarm components from a national chain home improvement store. You'll need area scanners in case they chop thru a barn wall if you bar the door too well with metal.
Lincoln Russell
>Garage security? You need various things:
1. Deterrence. The less bold thieves won't even try. Thus you've cut down the number of thieving attempts. That means Fencing. Signage. Visible cameras (but they wear hoodies and caps). If you see people wearing hoodies and caps on your private property, you are legally allowed to take their picture and they cannot stop you as long as you are on your property. Having their picture and car plates on record (and them knowing that) is useful in making them not try in the future.
2. Video and audio recording Evidence is needed. A lot of times, they will still beat the rap in court with a lawyer. But at least it will be on their record. They can only have so many accusations on their record before the police start to harass them (unless your area has black lives matter activists that defend them).
3. ALARMS It's always necessary. Without alarms, the bold ones will still come despite there being cameras. They know they have X seconds for snatch and run regardless.
4.FEAR OF POLICE OR HOMEOWNER GUN There are cases where someone breaks into cars right in peoples' driveway with the homeowner outside watching them. They ignore the shouting from the homeowner as they keep breaking car windows to get the stuff inside. Only when the homeowner pulled out a gun did the dude run off.
Jace Kelly
>If the locks were more solid I'd probably just go there in some junk car late at night, ram the port, quickly fill up the trunk with stuff and drive off.
That used to be one method decades ago. Working on the security doors of a major store like Best Buy is too slow as the proximity sensors have already alerted security. So they would simply steal a car and ram the entrance open and grab whatever they could in one minute or less and take off.
Nowadays, all the stores have some sort of decorative barricade at the front to make ramming harder. AND all the good stuff is located far back in the store so that the time spent running to fetch it takes awhile. That gives security a better chance of arriving to nab the crooks.
You've got to find some way to fence it off. Or you can put large rocks spaced around the front so if they try to drive up, the rocks would snag their car. You would not be the first homeowner to use rocks to stop people from driving onto their property.
Mason Cruz
>So I was just wondering what sort of locks and security solutions you guys have in your garages and workshops?
Fence keeps people far away. And they cannot wander in because the gates are locked and self-lock when shut. Therefore, anyone inside the fence is a trespasser for jumping the fence. Yeah, yeah, the burglars always lie in court and say the front door was unlocked (so no breaking and entering), the gate was open, etc.
Connor Walker
>So I was just wondering what sort of locks and security solutions you guys have in your garages and workshops? Are you going to have a fence and locked gate? You've got to stop the potential thieves from casing your place out to see if you are there or not.
Parker Peterson
Not sure user. Been mulling this over the past days (thx for the inputs everyone, many good tips so far), It's a difficult place to fence off for a few reasons (main one being that it has to be easy for delivery trucks to access at all times due to business). I'm starting to consider that maybe I should leave that place to its fate and build a new garage that's a bit larger on a better location, I think I can get away with it reasonably cheap and it'd be easier to fence and secure as well.
Wyatt Martin
>burglars always lie in court One defense about being found inside a house was the burglar said he thought he heard someone crying for help. So he bashed the door to get inside.
They will say anything when caught. It gets the sentence reduced a lot of times. Or if they play the race card, the prosecutor reduces the number of charges (much to the victim's displeasure). Getting the suspect to not use the race card reduces the total costs of the case. A prosecutor only has so much budget every year and if he needs more, the council will of course give it to him. But the city then is short of money.
Lucas Hughes
It's why timelapse recording cameras show if the person was casing the property or simply ran to the door and bashed it down due to hearing a call for help.
Jacob Bailey
>But I also need better doors and locks to be fair,
You also should think of how to deal and defeat the problem situations that occur when a thief is caught:
1. I saw the door was open and walked in. (you know for sure it was always locked).
2. Do you want to buy a painting? (you need no tresspassing and no solicitor signage and fencing)
Without a fence and signs, you'll be unable to prosecute anyone you catch because they will use any excuse from the standard list of DINDU template statements.
Christian Turner
amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B00ZW63ESC/ref=mp_s_a_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1480746430&sr=8-5&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_FMwebp_QL65&keywords=survellience camera&dpPl=1&dpID=51xfvMEmx0L&ref=plSrch I got one of these cheap cameras set up and a surveillance warning sign on the fence. whichever you get they're pretty much the same. You really have to do a good job at hiding the wires and a good router though if your garage is not connected to the house. You could get wireless if you care to replace batteries and spend a bit more. Surveillance is just a deterrent but you could lock up your tools, they don't like taking a lot of time dealing with them. These wired cameras dont seem to like the plugs/transformerL cold, so if you go the wired route try to plug them indoors or insulate them.
Grayson Peterson
Wouldn't that just lead to a Trayvon Martin scenario?
Josiah Mitchell
i walk around suburban neighborhoods with a hoodie, skittles, and an Arizona
whats the big deal?
Andrew Stewart
Presumably everybody knows about putting a pad lock on the garage door track, right?
Liam White
That is a standard home garage door track with those nylon wheels rolling inside that galvanized steel track.
>pad lock on the garage door track, Yeah, I looked at my track when it was first installed and there are places where the track has holes in it for placement of a padlock. The wheels cannot move past the padlock in the track.
The padlock defeats the usual trick of knocking out the top middle panel and reaching in to disconnect the garage door opener from the garage door. That lets thieves then slide the door up.
What the homeless do is knock a hole in the paneled door at the bottom and crawl in. The wooden ones are easy to get past as the wood is very thin in places. If metal, they just make one small hole and then use a sheet metal nibbler tool. They just squeeze the crank on it repeatedly and it nibbles a nice linear cut across the sheet metal. Eventually they nibbled a home they can get through. They shut the power off at the breaker box in the garage. Thus many things in the house no longer work including cameras unless you have a lot of UPS systems here and there. They already knew to cut the phone line and cable line at the junction box outside the house.
Hudson Barnes
>Wouldn't that just lead to a Trayvon Martin scenario?
They will try to use the racist angle of course. It works against politicians who are scared they won't be re-elected due to having a lot of minority or liberal voters. Thus the politicians will not protect the victims and may even instruct law enforcement to not protect the victims.
Daniel Watson
Some anonymous visitor from Mars might be doing just the same thing as you. He might have purchased a replacement barrel for a gun and then re-honed the barrel to clean out the rifling and then replaced the original gun barrel which had been test fired with the rifling marks recorded in the FBI database. The repolished bullets with no lot marker stamp might be loaded by this anoymous person from Mars.
Because this person is from Mars, he cannot be expected to know trigger safety.
Noah Davis
I don't know what I'm looking at there but when my garage was broken into recently they went in through the rear door with a padlock mechanism like this. Cut right through the hoop. Nothing stolen though, apart from my car there's mostly junk in my garage, the tools are all in the basement workshop.
Logan Murphy
>Cut right through the hoop.
A shame your garage got hit but good they didn't get inside your house through the garage as it was detached.
Seems like everyone has a bolt cutter nowadays due to harbor freight selling them cheap. With so many garages or toolkits having a bolt cutter, the thieves have armed themselves with their loot. Obama's free cellphones plan for the homeless resulted in them using the phones as a "here is loot" system.
The homeless are everywhere here. So if you ride any decent bicycle to the library or mall, it is guaranteed to have its hardened chain or cable cut and it'll be done in front of everyone because they are bold and desperate. The homeless have killed the bicycling green movement more or less in my city.
Ayden Wood
What city?
Alexander Walker
>Best protection is to have something really, really fucking crazy on your lawn or close to your garage.
If you can't stop them from checking if you are home or not, then you will keep losing.
Colton Hernandez
>Cut right through the hoop There are those thick disc-shaped padlocks that also guard the hoop to prevent it from being cut. People use locks like those at those storage locker places as they make it hard or impossible to get the tip of a bolt cutter onto something they can nip.
Thomas Hernandez
>Wouldn't that just lead to a Trayvon Martin scenario? Ironically, the mayor of trayvon's town was robbed outside his house by three DINDU. They took his wallet and cash but since he was there with his car keys and office building pass card, and they also took his mercedes. What they didn't know was that he was a VIP so the police were immediately swarming. The DINDU wrecked the car in a chase and one got away.
As expected, the two caught bailing out of the mayor's car (Damarcus Paige & Jermine Horne) claimed innocence. Due to prior run-in with the law, suspects have a bold cynical attitude because they know if they make the court case appear to be expensive and long lasting, the prosecutor will drop most charges in hopes of getting a cheap quickly resolved case.
It's why you got to be politically correct before any criminals are ever apprehended. That's because after they get caught, they might try to dredge up any discriminatory comments you made such as commenting about crime statistics.
Charles Miller
All they stole was the tig welder? I would go find out which one of your "friends" knew about a tig welder recently.
Ryder Edwards
You're hitting a good point there user and I've been pondering that a bit back and forth and there is one person in particular but I haven't figured out how to approach him yet.
Looking at it tactically they grabbed the one most expensive item in there that is also easy to pick up and carry. But there was a lot of fairly costly battery tools laying around and some other stuff, none of that was touched. I dunno if they were "kind" enough to leave that stuff as I had a half finished project sitting in there or if they had cold feet and wanted to get away asap, or if they just needed the welder.
Angel Bailey
No, I meant the hoop mounted to the door.
Joseph Johnson
It's too bad you don't weld or etch some sort of design into the cases of your tools. That allows for easier identification. At least you reported the crime to the police along with the serial number?
Evan Peterson
Put pic related and a dummy camera nearby
Nathaniel Watson
Not if everything is private property and there is a HOA with an officially recognized watch group (the city police can set up meetings to validate your HOA watch group). When you do all the proper politically correct actions, it is almost impossible for the trayvon martin problem to occur.
The key is that the roads and sidewalks must be private and not public AND that there is an officially recorded consensus among the owners to restrict access. This should be notarized for your legal protection. Many HOA operate with public roads and public sidewalks due to cost.
Justin Adams
Yea, haven't done anything like that. In hindsight maybe one could've put some little gps tracker/transmitter inside as well. Did report it, in the rare event the cops should come across something.
Adrian Allen
Without some easily visible marking that can be seen from a distance BY ANYONE, no one will know that unit was yours. But if it was clearly marked "Property of user" then he's always have to hide it away so that none of his friends or even strangers saw it. He would never be able to take it anywhere or sell it easily to feed his heroin or meth habit.
Easton White
Internet of Things wew lad
Isaac Gomez
Aye, it's a good idea, considering doing it on the remaining stuff, I think the only gripe I've had is if one wanted to sell off something it'd look better clean. Seen many professionals do this though. At the least they'd have to go through the trouble of swapping cover or casing.
Point taken user.
Carson Kelly
>Internet of Things wew lad
It's been coming in the car world years ago for BMW, GM, Kia, Lexus, Mercedes, and others. The cars that have both OBD2 and cellphones/lojack installed report the data (gps location, odometer, condition, stats) to the manufacturer thru info networks such as Onstar, Drive, or others. It will only increase from here on. It kinda sucks that there's already one specific model of electric toothbrush that reports usage data back to the manufacturer.
The Internet of Things. But those of you who have smart watches that report your pulse, location, time of day, how much you walk, blood pressure, and fat estimate already knew the internet of things was here for you already. You welcomed it by putting those things on.
Alexander Flores
>Outrage over a homeless person Not likely. Odds are they're not in regular contact with any loved ones and no one is gonna be upset if they turn up missing (at least not immediately).
Though, in states that frown on the use of lethal force to defend property, it may still be helpful to dump the carcass in a swamp or something.
Jeremiah Wilson
Basically this. Except have real cameras and I like to mark things I own with a some numbers that I write down on a pad of paper just incase it gets stolen I can give it to the police and they can ID it
Carter Robinson
>I write down on a pad of paper just incase it gets stolen I can give it to the police and they can ID it
The criminals will simply claim they bought it for cash from some anonymous. That is how they avoid a problem if it is just a serial number because they can claim you just made up some serial number based upon what you saw at a store. Since serial numbers are released in contiguous count batches to each region, the "sheer coincidence" defense sometimes works. But if you etch your license plate or some other unique ID that can be connected to you, that eliminates their coincidence defense.
