Your Home Is In Imminent Danger


Posted: 19th November 2014

Yes you read the headline correctly. Your property is in danger of being compromised by unwanted intruders at any given moment. As you read this gangs of interlopers are outside your property. They are eyeing up the weak and vulnerable spots in your building and they are going to affect a silent and possibly very expensive break in.

You may think you have the most up to date security system available to protect you; unfortunately this will not stop this heinous crime from happening. Nothing you have done or try to do will stop them. These invaders into your property have the ability to make over 50% of the population scream in abject terror. The very sight of them can make a fully grown man into a jabbering mess. They may well wake you in the middle of the night or they may just wait until you have got to work and then commit the “crime”. Whatever they do it will not be to your benefit.

So what is it that I am referring to? They are from the Araneae family (this is not a gang of thieves from outside the EU). They are air-breathing anthropods, Arachnids. Or to you and me spiders! Now I am not talking bird eating tarantulas here just your common or garden spider. Currently we have one living just outside our kitchen window. Its eight legs span out to about the size of a ten pence piece and it has being doing a wonderful job at keeping the autumnal wasp population down and I am happy to report that it yet to have a go at either of our dogs and has mostly not troubled the postman. However if it gets in to the house my life will become a misery. If I am not spending my time trying to catch it to placate my screaming wife I will be wondering where it is and will it decide to set up its winter retreat anywhere near any of the detection devices that make up our security system.

In days gone by spiders could get inside the passive infra-red detector (that is the thing in the corner of the room with the red flashing light) or even in some cases duel technology microwave sensors which are used in environments where small critters may lurk. Once inside they can cover the device that does the detecting thus making it think there is an intruder and triggering the security alarm. Nowadays most detectors are fitted with a piece of plastic to stop this happening. However if the spider decides to playfully swing from its web in front of the detector or if big enough to just blatantly walk over it you are going to have problems.

If, like me, you have one of AMCO’s alarms your problems will only be localised. The broken night’s sleep, the hysterical wife etc. If you are away from the property and a spider triggers the burglar alarm our operators are going to be able to hear that there is no criminal activity on site and act accordingly. If your intruder alarm is with another company (see previous blogs) then you problems could be untold. False alarms can mean expensive engineer resets. Multiple false alarms can lead to the withdrawal of police response. If you lose your police response it can lead to the loss of insurance cover. And so on it goes.

As a precaution to this impending invasion, a bit of housekeeping never goes amiss. If you can manage to get your vacuum cleaner or duster and clear any cobwebs from around the motion detectors, and if you can do it safely then a bit of fly spray around (not on) the security device. It won’t kill a spider but apparently they are not keen on it and tend to avoid.

So there we have it. If you are already an AMCO customer you need to arm yourself with a feather duster and a can of Flit. If you are with a different company you may also need your chequebook. And while you wait for the engineer to turn up to reset the alarm maybe you should look round the rest of our website!

I hope that after reading this you don’t get sleepless nights either from your alarm or your chequebook!