National Preparedness Month: How to Build a Home Security Plan
Ensuring the safety of your family and property through preparation
Ensuring the safety of your family and property through preparation
Does your family have a home security plan? Keeping your home safe takes more than installing a few cameras; it requires understanding how they fit into a broader plan that includes alerts and response to any number of potential threats and emergencies.
September is National Readiness Month, making it a perfect time to take an inventory of your current approach to security. That way, you can build a home security plan that covers as much as possible, keeping everyone in your family safe from potential intruders, fires, and other natural disasters. Here’s how.
The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) lays out four critical steps for effective emergency preparedness.
A home security plan starts with a family meeting. Ask each other important questions about what security and emergency preparedness means in your specific area. For example, you could ask about:
Knowing the answer to these questions will help guide the development of your plan, and whether you need to supplement that plan with a smart home security system.
During your discussion, you should also find out how you plan to receive alerts and warnings, and how you’re going to communicate with one another during a potential emergency. Monitoring public channels like local news and social media is helpful for broader emergencies that affect a geographic area. But it’s also good to have a home security system like Arlo Secure that can deliver personalized alerts if it detects suspicious activity near your house.
Armed with this information, you and your family can then lean into your plan to react to whatever emergency comes your way.
Every family’s needs are different. Some have specific dietary or medical requirements. Others have family members who need help moving around the house. Find out what these are and make them a part of your home security plan. Pack pet food, snacks for the kids, medications, and other essentials. Determine what each family member needs to ensure that everyone can respond to security threats safely and effectively.
A plan isn’t a plan until it’s written down. FEMA offers a handy Family Emergency Plan form on its website that makes it incredibly easy to keep track of important details for each family member, emergency contact information, meeting places, medical issues, and much more. Take some time to fill out the form and print it out so each family member has a copy easily accessible, wherever they are in the house.
Once you have a plan, try it out. See how well your family is able to learn about and respond to security events, and make adjustments if you need to.
Emergencies come in all shapes and sizes, and a home security system can help you react to many of them.
It starts with your security cameras. A good camera doesn’t just provide visual coverage of your property; it can capture audio, provide nighttime coverage, shine spotlights to deter invaders, and even send alerts directly to your phone.
Security cameras like the Arlo Pro 6th Gen can even lean on machine learning and artificial intelligence to smartly detect specific noises or events like fires and gunshots through its Early Warning System, giving you more specific information that you can respond to more effectively.
Whatever camera you choose, there are a few features you should keep in mind when building out a security system that aligns with your home security plan:
You don’t have to navigate emergencies alone. Arlo Secure and its AI-powered technology is purpose-built to detect emergencies and empower you with the tools and information you need to react.
While many of Arlo’s security cameras work without a subscription, adding Arlo Secure to your home security system offers a wealth of additional protection and notification options.
Sign up for Arlo Secure today to gain access to all of this and more, and ensure your family has a plan for today and tomorrow.
