Secure Your Home For Under $100

While home security systems are one of the best ways to make your home safer, they can cost hundreds of dollars and include monthly monitoring fees. If a home security system isn’t in the budget, there are other affordable options for making your home more secure. From adding longer screws to upgrading the strike plates on your doors to adding deadbolt locks and installing driveway sensors, there are many cheap and effective options for making your home safer. Here are 10 products that can help improve the security of your home for under $100. 

A simple and cheap way to shore up your home’s security is to upgrade the screws that secure the strike plate to the door. Builders usually use short screws on the strike plate that only anchor the door to the door jamb, which is made of weak wood. By putting in longer 3- to 4-inch screws, such as the ones listed, you secure the plate to the door framing, which is much stronger.  

Studies show that visible security cameras cut the odds of your home being burglarized in half. The problem is, security cameras can cost well into the hundreds of dollars. These dummy cameras from WALI are far cheaper and look authentic enough to fool burglars. They even have working motion lights and fake solar panels to further sell them as real working security cameras. 

Giving your house the appearance that you’re home when you’re not is one of the best ways to discourage burglars, and Govee’s smart plug offers a cheap way to do that. This kit gives you four smart outlets that connect via WiFi or Bluetooth. Position them throughout your home, plug lamps into them, then use the GoVee smartphone app to set schedules to turn the lights off and on periodically while you’re away. These smart plugs can even pay for themselves by helping you remember to turn off lights, saving you money on your energy bill. 

As we found when we reviewed it, Master Lock’s folding security bar offers an affordable way to beef up security to a main entry or sliding glass door. The bar, which is made from 20-gauge steel, creates a brace between the door handle and the floor, making it far more difficult for intruders to enter your home by kicking in the door. You can also use it as a sliding glass door brace. It even folds up, so you can take it with you to add security to your home away from home while you’re traveling. 

Just because a full home security system may be out of your budget, that doesn’t mean you can’t add security to your doors and windows. The YoLink LoRa smart window door sensors, the top pick from our Best Door and Window Alarms guide, come with four sensors you can install on windows and doors and a hub that connects them to your home’s WiFi. Once set up, you’ll receive alerts on your smartphone whenever a door or window is opened. 

This affordably priced motion-activated spotlight doesn’t require any wiring or sun exposure. As our testers found in our Best Outdoor Motion Sensor Lights guide, it activates reliably and casts enough light to discourage burglars and provide visibility around your home at night. It has a wide 600 square foot coverage area and will pick up motion from up to 30 feet away. 

This simple security kit, which topped our list of the Best Garage Driveway Alarms, includes an attractive solar power motion detector that sends a chime to the receiver up to a 1/2 mile away. It’s also expandable, so you can add additional sensors to cover various parts of your property. It’s a great option for homes that are set off from the road with longer driveways. 

Adding deadbolts to exterior doors that don’t have them is one of the most affordable ways to significantly beef up your home’s security. Kwikset’s Security 660 deadbolt lock offers an affordable way to do that. The lock also comes with Kwikset’s SmartKey Security, which protects against picking, bumping, kick-ins, and drilling, while also allowing you to rekey the lock yourself if needed. Plus, it’s available in six finish options. 

This security window film holds the broken pieces of glass in a window together in the event someone smashes it with a hammer or rock, making it more difficult and time-consuming for a thief to enter your home by breaking the window. It’s a great option for larger windows in concealed areas at the rear or sides of the home that are more vulnerable to break-ins. 

Along with adding longer screws to the strike plates on your exterior doors, you can also replace the entire strike plate with this reinforced model from Prime-Line. This strike plate functions as a single piece for both the doorknob and deadbolt lock. That design, coupled with its 3-inch-long screws, makes it much more resistant to kick-in attacks than the two individual strike plates that most doors have. 

 

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