The first big tip for all you garage door owners out there is to close your garage door. It is the simplest little thing you can do that will have the biggest effect on your security. All the fancy locks and fail safes of your garage door opener and garage door may work extremely well, but if you can’t remember to close your garage door when you leave or when you are in bed, etc. Then your garage door will do you no good from a security standpoint or really any stand point. Like all doors you are really only getting anything out of it when it is closed, so make sure that it becomes second nature to close your garage door after you get home or leave your home so that your garage door spends the minimum amount of time it can open. It may seem like a silly tip, but it really is the best one there is. Nothing screams vulnerable security like a garage door that is wide open, especially because an open garage door is so visible from the street making it practically an advertisement for those who you shouldn’t be advertising to.
Now that you have it etched into your mind that you should always have your garage door closed if you aren’t directly using it we can move on to somewhat more serious tips. The first real tip that isn’t essential a how to on doors is to make sure that your key code is actually something good. Far too often people’s passwords and codes are things like their birthdays or a part of their phone number or an anniversary. These are extremely easy to figure out and some of the first things that somebody will try out if they have studied up on you or even worse are someone that you actually know. In any case most of these things are just a few google searches away for potential intruders, so try to think of something harder than your anniversary or your kid’s birthday. Things that you would know but others wouldn’t are always good especially things like nonsense words or names put into numbers. Depending on if you have kids and their ages you may need go with simpler ideas, but nonetheless make sure that if someone wasn’t in your immediate family that they would have trouble guessing your key code.
Of course in the same vein as the key code’s actual make up is the use of the key code. Try not to give out your key code to every person that needs to get into your house for a day to water your plants or for that one week of your vacation. While you most likely trust the people that you give the key code to there is the possibility that one of those days that they are supposed to walk your dog they can’t do it and instead send a friend to do it for you. This means that somebody you may not even know or know about has access to your garage door and the rest of your house if your door is unlocked most of the time. While people’s intentions may have been good this means that your garage door’s key code may spread to unsavory characters without you ever knowing it. The easiest way to avoid this is to give out keys. Keys take a pretty big hassle to copy and will most likely stay in the hands of the people you trust for the most part. Another way to keep your garage door secure is to change your key code every so often. It doesn’t need to change weekly to an arbitrary 8-digit number, but it should change every year or two just to keep people you may have forgotten about from still having access to your garage. It may seem like an unnecessary measure, and hopefully it is, but it is far easier to look back on all of the attempted break ins you didn’t have than to lament those that you did.
Garage doors are now an everyday part of our lives and a part of our homes’ security. While it may seem like an inch or two of metal or wood doesn’t bring you too much security when it comes to your home it is important to remember that dissuading intruders is really half the battle of home security. The other half of course is the actual use of your home’s security system. Your takeaway from this article then should be to make sure that your door is always closed to dissuade intruders and to keep your key code hard to guess and out of the wrong hands.