Tag Archives: retirement

Home Security – 10 Tips To Protect Yourself And Your Family

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When people think of home security, they are inclined to think of electronic surveillance systems. However, there are other methods to protect yourself and your family from harm and burglars. I will give you my top ten tips for home security.

1] Windows are really the key to home security. Window-stays become loose or sloppy as they get older and now and then you can get a window-stay to jump off its peg by thumping the outside window frame. Fit window stay locks

2] Doors must be sturdy, well-hung on strong hinges and have secure locks. Fit deadlocks, especially on exterior doors.

3] Spare keys must not be secreted near the door under a mat, a flower pot or a stone. If you want to leave a key with a neighbour, select the neighbour cautiously. Be wary of those with teenage kids, their friends may become aware that the spare key in the fruit bowl is to your house.

4] Tools that can help a burglar must be locked away. Keep your shed and garage doors locked and if you have a ladder, chain and lock it to a fixed point like a wall.

5] Dogs are helpful for home security, but they should not be relied on. Some thieves will poison a dog to get in. If you leave your dog in the house, get a box to fit inside your door to collect whatever comes in, lock the letter box closed or seal it off permanently. If you leave the dog in the yard, try to get a neighbour to check up on it from time to time.

6] Plants and bushes should not be allowed to grow large enough to obstruct anyone’s view of windows and doors. Passers-by and ‘nosy neighbours’ are a big deterrent to burglars, but if no one can see a ground floor widow, the thief can gain access unobserved. if you do want bushes under your windows, make them tough, thorny ones.

7] Boundary walls or fences are your first line of defense. They can be a good deterrent, if you get the style right. Some people embed broken glass into the top of the wall, but this can be against the law and can hurt unwary cats. The best thing to do is nail carpet-gripper just below the top, inside lip of the wall. Anyone putting their hands over the wall to pull themselves up will get a very horrible shock and leave DNA.

8] Valuables should not be put on show near windows. Your house is your home not a presentation case. Put your TV, DVD player and video recorder in a cabinet, maybe get a safe for your valuables and conceal that too.

9] External lighting is a key part of nocturnal security. Get garden lights that are activated by motion (microwave) or heat (passive infra red), put at least one on each external wall of your house.

10] Electronic surveillance systems are a necessity these days. You do not need cameras, but they are useful for identifying intruders. Your home security system can be wired or wireless, monitored or not.

These top ten home security tips should prevent your home from becoming an easy target for burglars.

Owen Jones, the author of this piece, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with wired home security systems. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.

The Use Of Patio Heaters In Business

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If you run a restaurant, pub or any business using outdoor facilities in a temperate climate zone, then you will know that custom is likely to drop off when the weather gets colder. You know that you would not sit outside shivering yourself, so you do not expect anyone else to do it. The only answer is to change the outdoor ambient temperature to an acceptable level.

I have seen this done to stunning effect in Prague in October when there were heavy snow storms. People wanted to sit outside and enjoy the snow storm as long as they were fairly warm. A person’s primary heat comes from the body and is kept in with decent clothing, but it is nice to have a patio heater near-by just to add a glow to your face and hands.

If you have a business that only opens when it is warm enough, then you have an expensive business and these days expensive businesses do not survive long. You need to wring every last cent out of your business real estate and if that means putting patio heaters in, then that is what you should to do.

Patio heaters come in a range of forms, but they are not that dear to buy. Sometimes you can hire them too. Most of these outdoor heaters run on canisters of propane or butane gas, but there are mains gas varieties too. There are also electric ones, but they tend to be costly to run, unless you can generate your own electricity.

I think that the best two types are the box type where the gas canister goes inside the apparatus and the heat is directed at foot to knee height and the street lantern style, where the heat comes down from about seven or eight feet in height. The gas cylinder also fits inside these models lowering their centre of gravity and making them more difficult to unintentionally knock over.

These heaters are very safe although patrons should be advised to exercise care if they have young children with them. A standard heater will keep up to two tables and eight people warm enough to enjoy themselves even while it is snowing.

The lease of a few of these patio heaters or even their purchase will soon be off-set by your increased custom, particularly if your competitors are not using them. My wife and I will never forget our time in Prague, when it was snowing, drinking coffee and eating cake outside, watching people go by while we were as warm as toast due to the restaurateur’s prudence in providing patio heaters.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with the propane outdoor heater. If you are interested in patio heaters too, please click through to Residential Patio Heaters.

Should You Landscape Your Garden?

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If you have more than a small town garden, then landscaping your garden will probably be one of your considerations. If you have just bought the property, or you think that it is time for a garden make-over, there are methods of going about it. The easiest way of going about planning a garden, is to first take a good look at the landscape of your garden. This can be difficult if the garden is established and in full flower.

Therefore, it can be better to delay until autumn or winter, so that you can see the true lie of the land. You could make a plan of the garden on graph paper and take a lot of photos too. Identify the photos on the back of them and relate them to the grid on your graph paper. There may be bumps and hollows, potholes, rocky areas and even a marsh or a pond to deal with.

These are almost certainly natural features and if you want to change them, you will have to take on the underlying reason. The feature is only the symptom. Like freckles or spots! If you look at the state of affairs in this way, it makes planning easier.

For example, a rocky patch probably means that the Earth is pushing stones up slowly but surely and if you want to clean it up, you will be picking up stones for the remainder of your life. Similarly, if your wet area is the result of natural drainage from higher ground, you will have to drain it and put in permanent drainage, since it is not going to stop raining for you.

So, you can either work with nature or you will be working against it for the remainder of your life. Either that or paying someone else to do it for you. Another point is that the wildlife that uses your locale does so because of how it is. If you alter the landscape, your current range of flora and fauna might move on or just die. A lot depends on how much land we are talking about, but in general, I would say that the larger the area, the more you should leave it alone.

On the other hand, you can add features more easily than remove them. For instance, if you have an area with poor soil, you could improve it with compost or put a pond there. Shade and existing fences or sheds should also be noted on your graph paper, although being man-made, these are simpler to remove or alter.

Next you should decide what type of garden you want, within the constraints of the existing landscape, how much work you are prepared to put into it and how much money you want to pay out on it. Enhancing the natural elements of the land is the easiest way of landscaping your garden.

If you have a marshy area, why not put a low wall around it and turn it into a pond? If you have a rocky patch, why not collect up the stones and create a rockery? If you have a few trees, try growing wisteria, honeysuckle or vines through them.

If you are in the shade, buy flowers that prefer the shade and vice-versa. It is a struggle to go against nature and unless you have a good reason to do it, it is not really worthwhile. Then build a patio or deck and sit outside and enjoy all the landscaping that you have saved yourself in your garden.

Owen Jones, the writer of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with outdoor heat lamp. If you are interested in patio heaters too, please click through to Residential Patio Heaters.

Retirement Gifts For Golfing Enthusiasts

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There is a commonly held belief that golf is the exclusive realm of well-off entrepreneurs and businessmen. It is also still seen as an elite sport that is not easily accessible to regular blue collared employees. However, this is not really true any more as modernization and commercialization have brought these so-called exclusive sports into the realm of everyone.

This is because there is no necessity to have expensive equipment to have a game, so, unlike big game fishing and polo which need very costly resources like a boat or a horse respectively, golfers only require a set of golf clubs, which are reasonably affordable. With this in mind, retirement gifts for golfers and would-be golfers can be easily dreamed up.

Making personalized retirement gifts for golfers is quite an easy task as you could easily personalize golfing equipment with items such as home made golf club pouches, and caddy covers. These can be made by knitting (that is if you are into knitting) or any other handicraft requiring other materials.

You could think about golfing fashion by concentrating on the attire worn by golfers. You could even end up starting a new trend in golfing clothing by the using your imagination regarding the design of the apparel for your retiree.

The most common method of getting a retirement gift for golfers is to go along to the nearest sports shop and get your retiree something sold there. It may sound a little impersonal to just get the retiree a commercially sold gift, but then this may prove really useful if the retiree is still a novice golfer. Perhaps you could get a book on golfing or a subscription to a golfing magazine.

However, you could find out what your retiree golfer still needs, and perhaps also use your imagination to think about in what ways you can enhance the golfing equipment he may already have.

Commercially made golfing equipment is always a safe bet. If you want to make your retiree feel great, buy him or her a famous-name set of golf clubs, thereby making him feel like a professional.

You could go to a joke shop and ask if they have any joke items for the golfer there. They probably do, since golfing is such a popular game.

The gag gifts should be chosen quite carefully as it could be a sensitive matter for the retiree, especially those who are still novice players. Gags as gifts in relation to golfing might be taken the wrong way and hinder their progress if they are upset by the idea emphasized by the gag or joke given to them.

As for veteran players who are already well adapted to the game, the gift of a good gag on their retirement day would be quite funny since they would already see golfing not only as a way to relieve stress, but also to actually just have some fun.

Retirement gifts for golfers are really just a simple way to make your golfer friend enjoy life after his career is over.

If you are interested in golfing or retirement gifts for golfers, just come along to our website on Golfing Tips for Novices.

Home Garden Security Lighting

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One of the most fundamental steps you can take when building your home security system, is the installation of garden security lighting. Garden security lighting is also one of the most effectual ways of deterring criminals and it is one of the cheapest methods too. All in all the installation of garden security lighting is the most effective and cost-effective method of home security

Other outdoor security measures such as security cameras are much more expensive and only serve one purpose, that is the security of your home. On the other hand, garden security lighting can be used to provide a welcoming light to show the path to your front door to your visitors or to light up your backyard if you want to sit outside or admire a particularly beautiful group of flowers. They are also good for illuminating a fountain on a pond.

Adding motion sensor lighting controls to your garden security lighting also increases its effectiveness. The passive infra red motion sensors will pick up body heat automatically and switch the light on framing the moving object in a powerful beam. Microwave sensors provide a similar function but work on movement. They extend the length of time the bulb will last and reduce electrical consumption, while making sure you get light when you need it.

However, if you sit behind closed curtains in your home at night, you may not see the warning of the lights coming on. Therefore, some of these garden security lighting units have a built-in bell or buzzer which makes a sound when the light comes on. You can also have them send a signal to your main indoor alarm system control box, which will beep and let you know where the light is that was triggered (front, rear or side of the house).

Garden security lighting can also be solar powered. This makes them slightly more expensive to buy but very much cheaper to put in and to run. Some of these lights are permanently fixed to the house’s fascia boards while others are just pressed into the soil. This latter sort are ideal for garden parties that go on into the night, as long as you remember to put them back where they should be before going in.

It is a good idea to aim the motion sensors of the lights some four feet above ground level or they will be switched on by every cat that comes over your wall in the middle of the night. Likewise, you can turn down the sensitivity of the PIR or microwave sensors so that the sensors do not pick up birds like pigeons.

The lights have daylight sensors on them too so that the motion sensors only activate the light at night. Some of these sensors will still register movement in the daytime and report it back to the main unit if you want that.

So, all in all, there are plenty of different options when you are considering home security, but garden security lighting has to come at the top of your list, if you want an effective, reassuring home security system.

Owen Jones, the author of this article, writes on many subjects, but is currently involved with home security systems comparison. If you are interested in Security Systems For Home Use, please click through to our site.