Aquaguard Swimming Pool Alarm Adds Safety to the Backyard
Friday, April 27th, 2007
You can spend thousands of dollars building a fancy home security system to protect your material belongings from burglars, but don’t forget about home safety; it’s just as important to protect your family from accidents.
If you’ve got a swimming pool in your backyard, this is a place where people, especially small children, can be injured or even drowned. Kids just shouldn’t be using the pool without adult supervision. Try telling them that though.
If you’re worried your children, or perhaps the neighborhood children, will enter your pool when you’re not in the yard, a pool alarm is a good way to add some peace of mind. These devices alert you whenever someone tries to get into the water.
The Aquaguard alarm from Frontgate has two sirens to ensure you’ll be alerted if a child enters the pool, but they aren’t supposed to go off (false alarms) due to high winds or other “natural” disturbances. The system looks pretty easy to install and is available online for about $500.
A lot of home security is designed to keep unwanted people out of your home, but it’s important to think about safety on the inside too–especially if you have a family including small children. A lock on the front door is great, but what if there’s a door leading to steep steps or a pantry with cleaning agents inside and you don’t want your kids to be able to get through? That’s where a child safety lock like this one can come in handy.
If you want to set up security monitoring as part of your home security system, there are lots of kits out there that make it easy to do it yourself these days. Wireless is definitely easier to set up than wired systems (which involve drilling into walls and running wires behind the drywall–unless you fancy cords all over your house), and today’s systems are much more reliable than older models.
For most people, a little safe that is bolted to the floor in their bedroom closet is enough security for their valuables, but if you need more room, you could check into having a dedicated vault built for your home or home-based business (if you sell on the Internet and store items in your home, they would be much better protected in a vault than in the basement). 
As far as home security and home safety goes, it’s a good idea to have house numbers that are easily visible not only by day but by night too. That way if the police or an ambulance has to find your house in the middle of the night, they won’t have to guess at which home is yours (and it helps the pizza delivery guy get your dinner there on time too).