I moved house six months ago and it needed a fair amount of work which is now nearing completion. Last night a large blue planted pot that was next to the front door was stolen. It wasnt expensive so not too much of a problem but it made me realise that i have been far too relaxed with security. The area is a fairly nice cul de sac but the wider area is known to have a fair bit of crime so i'm seeing this as a wakeup call. Can anyone reccomend a system both internal and/or external alarm, security lights and is a camera overkill?
This is solely dependant on your budget. Often a fake alarm box with a flashing light is a good enough deterrent, although it won't stop anyone nicking your pots... A security light would definitely be a good idea, at both the front and back of the house. Don't go and buy a cheap £5 one though, they're generally unreliable. As for cameras, unless you want to put something ugly and very overt on the front of your house, discreet cameras are only going to help try and find out who is doing it, not prevent it happening. None of this is overkill and is becoming more and more common place in houses now.
Decent NAS box such as a Synology setup with IP Cameras will record any motion over several cameras. Can be setup to perform incremental deletes after a week or two to avoid wasting disk space. You can also get exterior security lights that use 60W efficient bulbs rather than the 500W standard bulbs, saves a lot of power if they are on for quite a while. Also get to maximum brightness pretty fast. Personally I use 120W 'low' power bulbs in my lights, work fine in my area.
For me i would have to say this lol but on a serious note probably a cctv system would be best, and if you can afford it one that also records sounds also an old boss had some of these around his house its a normal flood light with a built in camera which takes a photo every so many seconds when the PIR/motion sensor sensor detects movement which records the images to an SD card hope this is of any help