Home Security Gadgets & Reviews

When you’re considering security lighting options for your home, you don’t just want to think about keeping burglars away from your yard; you want to think about home safety. The outside of your house should be well lit so friends and family will not hurt themselves when coming home after dark. Important areas to light are pathways and driveways (driveway lights are great for protecting the lawn on either side of the borders). Driveway lights can be a pain to install, though, since most require underground wiring be run from a power soure at the house to each individual light. But today you can get solar driveway lights that can be installed without much effort.

With solar driveway lights, you basically just stick them into the ground and set up the solar module, which collects energy throughout the day and uses it to power LEDs inside the lamps at night.

The lights shown here are a snap to install. They can be purchased at Shades of Light for $65 a piece. Available colors are red, amber, and white.

Shades of Light

It’s not often that you say, “Check out that bad boy” when you’re talking about smoke detectors, but this sleek unit might prompt you to utter those words.

The Jacon Jensen smoke alarm looks a lot more interesting than your usual round, white unit. It’s functional as well as stylish: “It is an ionising smoke detector which reacts rapidly to fast growing and especially hot fires.”

Runs on a single 9-volt battery.

From Questo Design.

If you’ve always thought it was neat when guests came to apartment complexes or condos and pressed the intercom to talk to the homeowner and be let in, now that’s something you can achieve in your own home.

The Doorbell Fon Door Answering System from SmartHome hooks into your doorbell. When the button is pressed, the system rings the phones in your house with a distinctive ring. Just pick up the phone, and you can find out who’s at the door without even leaving the room. If friends are at the door, tell them to let themselves in, and if it’s a salesman, tell him to take a hike.

SmartHome also sells a kit that you can hook up in addition to the Doorbell Fon, which allows you to press star to unlock your door. Just the answering system shown here is $150.

Doorbell Fon Door Answering System

A dark backyard can be a haven for burglars. Since they prefer to ply their trade under the cover of darkness, it’s in your best interest to light up your yard. You don’t have to use extremely bright lights that will annoy the neighbors and shine in your bedroom window all night, but consider lights that provide at least as much illumination as a bright full moon.

If you have a structure tucked into the corner of your back yard (i.e. detached garage, green house, shed), you probably don’t want potential burglars snooping around it (these structures often contain tools a thief can use to break into the house). It’s a good idea to light a shed, garage, etc.

This solar shed light from Earth Tech Products would probably do the job. The solar panel above the lamp sucks in the sun’s energy during the day, and powers the light below for many hours into the night. A nice bonus to solar-powered lights is they don’t require electrical wiring.

This one costs $90.

Earth Tech Products