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Sunday, January 19th, 2020 1:57 AM

Basement protection

Bought ourselves the SimpliSafe system and lots of sensors and installed it between over the holidays. My question is the basement.

We have a 60 sq. foot basement divided into two small rooms and one large. All the typical basement windows have glass block. One, at the end of the large room has an egress wiindow down in a window well. You woud have to be in serious danger and fairly fit to use it  At the other end of that long room is the stair going up into the house.

The only sensor we have down there is a glass break near the stair pointing into the large, long room, 30 feet from the window with the egress insert.
The other windows are in the other rooms. The doors will never be closed when we're not in the basement. I close one to keep my dust in my shop when I'm butchering wood, etc.

Will that sensor work that far from the windows?

We do not have an entry sensor on the basement door. I have a physical latch 2/3rds of the way up. It would be very hard standing on the stair to kick in the door and very noisy. We'd like to be able to have the alarm on when we're in the basement. But, we often go up and down the stair.

What may we do to better secure the basement?

IndyDMan

2.8K Messages

5 years ago

I'm not sure the one glass break sensor will protect from 30 feet away, may want to test it a few times (and you can set the sensitivity switch, inside the sensor, to high/med/low - my guess is you'd want to set it to high at that distance - and if it doesn't work well in test mode OR live mode, move it closer to the window).  You could also consider "layered protection", and include either a sensor on the window or motion sensor in the room.

For the other two rooms, you could consider a motion sensor nearest their entries, or, put a motion sensor at a point leading up the stairs (at a point before the door could be opened).  Keep in mind, motion sensors, by default, are set to OFF in HOME mode, but you can set them to anything you want according to your circumstance (i.e., ON in AWAY mode or at night when you're home sleeping, or, if you have the interactive monitoring plan, you can set them to "secret alert", which sends you an SMS text message, or if you have the phone app, a push notification).  Secret alert does NOT sound the alarm, does NOT notify monitoring, and NO dispatch will be sent.
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