At Central Alarm, we’re always encouraging our customers to follow industry-standard best practices.
It’s still pretty common today for people that own homes to use Hide-a-Keys around their house, or to simply put a key where they think someone can’t find it. We recommend to ALL of our customers that they do not follow these practices as they severely reduce the security of your entire home.
Hidden Keys Aren’t Hidden
As much as it might feel like a clever hiding place, trust us – burglars know all of them. There are only so many places that a key can be hidden around a home and still be accessible in need. Those that are truly interested in gaining entry into the home have likely a working understanding of where most places may contain a hidden key. Consider also it may only take 5 minutes to thoroughly check most places a key might be hidden.
Hide-a-Key specific solutions like terrain are extremely easy to spot.
Key Lockbox
Another more secure option if you always want to keep a key handy is to use a key lockbox that has a sophisticated enough code to make it difficult to guess. These can be securely mounted to the structure and take a significant amount of work to break into. These offer a cheap solution to simply keeping a key above the door frame or on top of a lamp in the back yard.
Smart Locks
If you want to go key-less, or provide a way for other people to get into the home like children or other family members, a much more suitable option is a Smart Lock that allows you to use a code in order to unlock the door. These technologies have come quite a ways in the last decade and offer the convenience of keyless entry into the home with the added security of at least up to a 5 digit code.
We do however recommend that you change your code semi-regularly as the number of people that might know the code can grow. Once a year it’s a good practice to change your code and redistribute it to those that need access.
There are additional tools coming out as well that utilize phone entry solutions using WiFi and Bluetooth.
Please stay safe out there and remember that Central Alarm is here for all of your home or business security needs!
