Is Your Garage a Pathway For Burglars?

I first heard about this technique of how burglars are breaking into houses at the beginning of 2009. I wrote an article for our newsletter about it at that time. Lately, though, I’ve heard about this happening again, so I thought I would put another warning out there.

I’m talking about a technique burglars use for breaking into your garage and possibly from there into your house. There seems to be no end to the cleverness of creeps.

Check out the photo above. Do you have a roll-up garage door like this? If so, this warning applies to you.

Just inside the little windows that let light into the garage there hangs a release rope with a handle on it. One of those is in this photo. In the event of a door opener malfunction, if you pull down on this release, it will disengage the door from the opener and allow you to roll it up or down manually.

See how close this release is to one of the little windows? The bad guys have figured out that if they make sure you’re not home one night, they can break that little window, reach in and pull the release from outside and then just roll the door up.

Once inside, they can ransack your garage and possibly steal a car if one is in there. They could even break into the house from there. Sure, if you have an alarm it will go off when they break into the house but not when they open the roll-up garage door.

If you want to prevent this from happening in your garage, there’s a simple fix. Simply remove the release rope from the opener and store it somewhere else handy in the garage. If the automatic opener ever malfunctions, you just re-attach the rope and release the door.

A very, very simple fix! That’s what we did back in 2009. It took all of about 10 minutes.