Burglary - Important Notice Regarding Household Contents Insurance

Good point - we'll check that right away...

Hi,
I would like to add to your list:

Spend the "couple of euros" more and equip your house with windows and doors of a higher resistance class.

Specifically, you should reconsider the following security features:

- Mushroom head locking bolts

- Multi-point locking

- Steel cores in the frame and sash of doors and windows

- Outdoor lighting with motion detectors

- Alarm system

- Video surveillance

Compared to the total construction costs, you can do quite a lot for security during the planning phase with comparatively little financial effort.

Lockable handle roses are also important! If the burglars are state of the art, they have small, vibrator-like devices. If you press them properly against the frame and tune the vibration frequency to the window’s natural frequency, you can simply rattle open a non-locked handle.

At first, I thought this was for revolver pistols until a neighbor (a police officer in a special operations unit) confirmed to me that they themselves use such devices. It apparently doesn’t work on every window, but on a surprisingly large number.

Best regards,

Andreas

lockable handle recesses are also important!

You are right - I forgot to mention those - however, we have already installed them on all the windows...

important are also the lockable handle recesses!

or the version with a button. it can be shaken from outside for 1000 years and nothing will happen.

With variants without a key, you can quickly get through the frame with a cordless screwdriver and the appropriate drill bit, insert the wire, and flip the handle.

From my point of view, the burglar-resistant glass and the grating were also forgotten here.

To turn the thread into a discussion:
There are many different ways to get into a house (prying open windows/doors, smashing, sawing, etc.) and to feel especially safe, you would have to do something against all these variants. You never know beforehand with what equipment the next thief will arrive.
Depending on how difficult you make it for the thief, the damage to the building can be very large. This means not only higher costs for the insurer (if they pay everything) but also a lot of running around concerning craftsmen, appraisers, etc. The effort would be correspondingly lower with minor damage due to low security precautions.
Now some argue: if you only make it difficult enough for the thief by increasing the duration of the attempted break-in to 3-4 minutes, he will give up. But you can also say that the thief can get in anywhere if he wants to. It could also be claimed that thieves are attracted to particularly protected houses because of the especially protectable interior.
From my point of view, you pay many thousands of euros to feel safer, not because you will be spared a burglary or it will end more benignly. I do not need this felt security and therefore will not make the various investments for it.
With alarm systems, motion detectors, video surveillance, and self-triggered guns, you always have to ask yourself what each individual measure achieves and how safe it is against false alarms.
Do I want an automatic notification to the police if something happens in the garden? Who then pays the costs in case of a false alarm? What good does the burglary notification do me on vacation or at work? If the neighbor happens to be there at that moment, does he go over to my place and endanger his life? How much do the alarm system and I bother the neighbors when the dog or the careless teenager triggers it at the crack of dawn? What do I do with the nice HD recordings of the masked burglars?
Aside from the costs of all these systems, I also have to operate all of them properly (lock all the olives before leaving the house, arm the alarm system, regularly check all systems for functionality) and must not get worked up by alarms. I do not want to panic every time the light reacts to a cat outside again.