If Your Porch Light Is On Right Now, Burglars Already Know Something

Go and look at your porch light. If it is the middle of the afternoon and it is on, this video is about what that says. I came to this country twenty years ago, and later I went back to the country I come from and was a soldier in its war. That taught me which houses on a street are being watched over, and which only look like it. A porch light does not keep anyone out. That is the first honest thing to say. What it does is write a sentence to the street, and you are writing it whether you mean to or not. This video reads that sentence at four hours of the day — two in the afternoon, dusk, eleven at night, three in the morning — and then changes it for seven dollars and twenty minutes. What the sources actually say, none of it a theory of mine: About half of all burglaries involved no force at all. The door was unlocked or the window was open. Eight in ten of the men in a university study of 422 burglars checked for an alarm before anything else; six in ten went to another house if there was one. Only about one in eight ever picked a lock. Of the burglaries where the hour was known, about six in ten happened in daylight. One of the men who answered a television station's letter from prison wrote that he looked for a porch light on with all the window blinds closed. Another named his hour: between twelve-thirty and two-thirty in the afternoon. The one serious review of street lighting found crime fell 21 percent — and fell as much in daylight as in the dark. It was never the light. It was the street looking watched. A sixty-watt bulb left burning day and night costs about $96 a year. A ten-watt LED that reads the sky costs about $8, and pays for itself in the first month. The fix is a dusk-to-dawn bulb for about seven dollars, or an outdoor photocell timer at the outlet for about twelve. Neither is a security system. That is the relief. Change the bulb in daylight, with the switch off. Anything at an outdoor outlet must be rated for outdoor use and plugged into a covered outdoor outlet. If the box does not say outdoor, it does not belong there. This channel is for homeowners who want practical preparation without buying somebody else's fear. Nothing in this video is sponsored and nothing is linked. I am not selling you anything.