Summary
➡ To protect your home, consider using robust systems that prevent hacking, backup power supplies for your cameras and monitors, and solar-powered surveillance cameras. Strengthen your door locks and barricades with longer screws and extra locking systems. Guard dogs can provide early warning of threats, but should not be relied on for physical defense. Lastly, your own self-defense and firearms training is crucial, along with an escape plan and emergency supplies like fire extinguishers, first aid kits, and body armor. A bonus defense layer could be a bunker or panic room, but remember it’s only a temporary solution.
Transcript
All of these layers of defense will be invaluable in an SHTF scenario, but more importantly, they will keep you and your family safe in any situation. It’s also important to remember that your possessions are secondary and replaceable. There is always the risk that a situation will arise where the only safe option is for you to abandon your home, but by fortifying these layers, my hope is that you won’t ever have to exercise that option and that you can deter, delay, and defend your home. The first line of defense, but not the most important by a long shot, is going to be a means of remote surveillance.
This may come in the form of monitoring radio communications or drones. Drones are an incredible and rapidly evolving technology that allow for reconnaissance over a very large area from the safety of your home. While many drones do require special licensing to operate, after an SHTF situation, the government’s obviously going to have their hands full, and it’s unlikely that anyone will enforce these laws. You should, however, always respect the laws of your region. That said, there are many drones which will still afford you this reconnaissance capability while being lightweight enough that you can fly them in residential and commercial areas without requiring a license.
Many consumer drones, however, also use GPS. This means that they could be a beacon to your location. There are, however, some fantastic options that can operate without GPS satellite communication. My recent addition has been a thermal drone, which enables me to see heat signatures from miles away. Nobody is able to get within the line of sight of my property no matter what the time of day is with this bird in the air. To call this thing a force multiplier is an understatement. If you’re looking for something that doesn’t require a license, is lightweight, compact, and cost effective, I would recommend the DJI mini drone.
If you’re looking for something more advanced that has thermal capabilities, check out the Autel thermal line. Link will be in the description below. The second line of defense is one that I feel is often overlooked in the preparedness community but is arguably one of the most important, and that is your relationship with your neighbors and community. There is power in numbers, and having a strong relationship with good neighbors is invaluable. This is a relationship that will take time to develop and you don’t want to be too overt with your intentions, but spend time in your community and get to know people as best as you can.
As important as finding good neighbors is, it’s also important to be aware of the troublemakers within your own community. 65.1% of burglaries are committed by a person known to the homeowner. This is where your own reputation within the community comes into play. If people know that you are not a soft target, they are going to be less likely to want to mess with you in the first place. Nobody wants to risk injury or worse just to feed their drug habit or loot and pillage when the grid goes down. So when I’m out and about in my community, I’m constantly taking note of who’s who, who are the potential troublemakers, and I always make them aware that I am aware of who they are.
The third layer of home security is going to be early warning systems and perimeter defense. Things like driveway warning systems, tripwires, or any perimeter based system which notifies you that a perimeter has been breached. These work similar to motion sensors and surveillance systems. The difference being that these tools can notify you from a greater distance giving you more time to respond. For example, we demonstrate this fifth ops tripwire system here. These early warning systems can also have silent alarms. Trespassers will be unaware that they’ve alerted you to their presence, providing you with a valuable strategic element of surprise.
For example, the Dakota system that I use alerts you when a vehicle enters your property by emitting a chime inside your home. The fourth layer of home defense is going to be signage. We’ve done videos on the power of signage on your property, and there’s all kinds of creative ways that you can use signs to communicate with would-be trespassers. You can use signs to telegraph to potential criminals that you are ready and waiting for them, and that there are deterrents that will make trespassing a risky venture should they proceed. Signs can be notifying, intimidating, or deceitful.
For example, you may have a sign that says you have an alarm system even though you don’t. This in itself may deter some criminals. Other signs, like trespassing prohibited, sends a message that you are vigilant about defending your property. Even a sign that says your premises are under video surveillance may be enough to deter a threat. Now, in the case of a full-blown SHTF situation, while the good old trusty Canadian prepper mantra, trespassers and looters may be sniped, could prove to be an effective method of subterfuge, whether or not you intend to actually follow through with the threat or not.
The fifth layer of defense is going to be lighting. Criminals prefer to work under the cover of darkness. Motion lights and sensor lights are a great deterrent, as they can catch trespassers off guard. This puts them in the spotlight for you or any neighbors within the line of sight to see. Solar-powered motion LEDs are a great option, as they can be placed anywhere on your property and require very little installation and maintenance. A bonus item for this layer, and something I use often, would be a high-powered flashlight. This immolent MS-32 flashlight is a 200,000 lumen behemoth that will not only allow you to see every corner of your property from a long distance, but you can also temporarily blind and obscure the vision of any potential intruder.
High-powered floodlights and spotlights are essential for a larger off-grid homestead. The sixth layer of home defense is going to be gates and obstacles. There are some simple ways to design your property that will dissuade a criminal from targeting you in the first place. Remember, criminals love to take the path of least resistance. This is how you can control their movements on your property. Even a small gate can slow down a criminal or deny them immediate access to some part of your property. It’s important, however, that these gates and obstacles not be usable cover for criminals. For example, having tall fences or trees that obscure the line of sight into your home may be used as cover for criminals.
Remember the Fort Knox line of sight principle. You want to enhance your line of sight while having obstacles in the way of your invaders ingress. Many shrubs and thorny bushes can act as great discrete barriers providing a natural obstacle while not completely obscuring your view. If you don’t have gates or chain-link fences, a simple solution like locking that fence is going to buy you just a little bit more time in a threatening situation, and a bolt cutter is one more tool that a criminal has to carry. You can check out this video we did with our pal Dean from Arcopia for more ideas on how to fortify your property.
In a full-blown Mad Max situation, there are numerous other obstacles that you can place on your property, from downed trees to Jersey and Hesco barriers, ballasts, trenches, boulders, and even militaristic implements like dragon’s teeth. If you really have the time and the will, there’s dozens of ways to make it nearly impossible for unwanted vehicles to enter your property. The seventh layer of defense is your surveillance system. Now, the surveillance system has two potential uses. One is deterrence. When people see that you have a camera system, they’re less likely to target you because that’s just one more hurdle they have to overcome, and it bears repeating that criminals always want to take the path of least resistance.
The other purpose is to notify and identify potential threats on your property. They also, of course, serve the purpose of recording events so the authorities can prosecute lawbreakers in the future. It’s important to note here that you can use real surveillance cameras, decoy cameras, or you can use a blend of the two. Lots of surveillance cameras today double as motion sensors. For instance, a ring system, which is grid-tied, notifies you when there’s movement, and even has some smart AI features that will allow it to discern between what is a real threat and what isn’t. In my personal experience, however, a hardwired closed-circuit surveillance system is far more reliable than a wireless system, especially if you have them professionally installed with proprietary software.
These typically are the most robust systems when it comes to preventing hacking. In such a case that the power does go down, you will need a backup power supply to power your cameras and your monitors. Both of these are very low-draw devices which can be easily powered by one of the many silent lithium power generators that we’ve reviewed on this channel. We’ve also recently reviewed a product called the Vosker Surveillance Camera. So long as the grid is up, this is a great option. This uses a cell network as opposed to the Wi-Fi in your home, and it doesn’t require a power source as it runs on solar panel.
It can be set up anywhere on your property even if it’s out of range of your Wi-Fi, so long as there’s cellular service. The eighth layer of defense are your door locks and barricades. Most locks are easily picked and busted through without much effort. A criminal armed with a sledgehammer or a pry bar will get into almost any door in seconds. A simple $1 hack that can drastically increase the strength of your door is replacing the 1-inch screws that are typical on standard door lock strike plates with 3-inch ones. This will increase the amount of time that it takes to kick in a door.
You might also want to consider an extra point locking system. The Doricade is a product that we reviewed recently, which is a relatively inexpensive way to make a door virtually unbreachable. As you can see here, in our testing it literally took a battering ram to beat down this door. Other reinforcement options include door bars, window bars, night locks, padlocks, locking gates, locking storm doors. Basically anything you can do to put more time between you and an invader. In an SHTF situation, using sandbags to fortify your home will not only act as a barricade, but they are also largely bulletproof.
I recommend every prepper have an ample supply of sandbags at their disposal for when things really take a turn for the worse. The ninth layer of defence is going to be guard dogs. Guard dogs are a great threat deterrent and can also act as an early warning system. Their keen senses allow them to identify potential threats much sooner than humans can. Dogs should not, however, be relied on to fight your battles for you. The whole point of all these layers of defence is to buy you time, to mount a defence or to evade. Dogs are likely to be harmed if it comes down to a physical altercation and they, like your family, deserve to be protected.
There are many excellent breeds of dogs for home defence, but always remember to do your research on potential breeds before adopting dogs for this purpose. Personally, I have several German Shepherds which are strong and obedient, but at the end of the day, any decent sized dog who loves his family will be a force to be reckoned with if it hits the fan. The tenth layer of home defence is you and your family. The people in your home are the last line of defence against outside threats. All the layers we’ve discussed thus far were designed to ensure that a situation never gets to this point.
However, your ability to neutralize a threat in a situation like this will rely on your self-defence and firearms training. It is a well-known fact that an invading army is twice as likely to incur casualties as a defending one, so use your home turf advantage to the fullest. If you live in a country that permits the use of firearms for home defence, a shotgun is a reliable, versatile option. It’s also important that you have an escape plan if the situation spirals out of control. Again, protecting your and your family’s safety is the number one priority. There is no sense in protecting your possessions if it means you’re putting anyone at risk of serious injury.
Some other items you’ll want to consider for home defence are things like fire extinguishers, fire blankets, gas masks with appropriate filters to protect against smoke and pepper spray, a good first aid kit, body armour, sandbags for flood mitigation and home fortification, high-powered blinding spotlights, close combat weapons and pepper spray. And it’s essential that you have a strategy to deploy all these items at a moment’s notice. Now the eleventh layer of defence is a bonus layer. It’s going to be a bunker or a panic room. The purpose of a safe room is a place for you to hole up in case of an emergency.
But it should be noted that these are only meant to protect you for a couple hours until emergency services arrive. If we’re talking about a post-disaster world where help won’t be able to come, you might just be a sitting duck. Start yourself by gearing up at CanadianPreparedness.com, where you’ll find high-quality survival gear at the best prices, no junk and no gimmicks. Use discount code preppinggear for 10% off. Don’t forget the strong survive, but the prepared thrive. Stay safe. [tr:trw].
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