Add it all up, and you’ve shelled out a lot of money.
Professional monitoring costs $30 a month. And it’s $19 for that yard sign that lets the neighbors (and maybe anyone with less than honorable intentions) know you’ve gone to the trouble of doing all this. Need more than two door or window sensors? Extras cost $25 a piece. Scroll through the Abode website, and your shopping cart can fill up quickly with more gadgets. The kit includes a siren, a camera with a motion sensor, two door sensors and a key fob.īut those items only get you so far. Once I got around to opening the box, I found the system surprisingly easy to use, with simple instructions, stick-on equipment and a nifty app. As the box sat unopened for a good two weeks, staring me down in its sleek packaging, I learned the first downside to D.I.Y. That is how I ended up giving smart security a try, sampling a $299 starter kit from Abode. Hear one story about a loved one’s house getting ransacked and panic sets in. “We live in about the safest time in history, as far as we know, but people are more fearful,” said Barry Glassner, a sociologist and the author of “The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.” But that’s not stopping us from fortifying our homes. The number of burglaries in the United States dropped by 28 percent between 20, according to the F.B.I. This newfound verve for home security comes at a time when crime is actually falling. product with Samsung called SmartThings.īy 2020, the number of people using smart security is expected to swell to over 22 million from nearly 3 million users in 2014, according to a report by NextMarket Insights, a research firm. Traditional security companies with technicians who come out to set the whole thing up for you and then bind you to a multi-year contract are getting smart, too. Hook up enough cameras, sensors and sirens and you can monitor your home with an app on your phone or pay a professional service to do it for you, without signing an onerous contract. Now that we can shout at Alexa to dim the lights or turn on the heat, many of us are busy installing do-it-yourself security systems like Abode, SimpliSafe and LiveWatch. It seems that our security habits are changing though. Yet, only 17 percent of houses in this country have a security system, according to the National Council for Home Safety and Security, an industry trade association and my house was not one of them. You would think that I would have had one already - buy a house and one of the first things your broker (or your mother) tells you to do is to secure the place. After my sister’s house was broken into and burglarized last summer, I decided to get a home alarm.