A house that sits empty for a while looks different from one that is lived in. Mail piles up, the lights never change and the trash bins stay put. Preparing your home before a trip comes down to two things: making the house look occupied, and making sure your alarm system and the people around it are ready if something happens while you are away.
Arm and disarm the system a few days before you leave and look for trouble messages on the keypad. Low-battery warnings, a sensor that will not show as closed or a communication trouble should be dealt with before the trip, not discovered from an airport. If something needs attention, call your alarm company early enough for a technician to come out.
If your system is professionally monitored, your contact list matters more than usual while you are away. You may be on a plane, in a different time zone or somewhere without signal. Make sure the people on the list are actually in town during your trip, live close enough to check on the house and know they are on the list. Someone who is also travelling, or who lives far across the county, is not much help at night.
Ask your monitoring company how they would like to be told about your trip. Some let you add notes or temporary contacts for the dates you are gone. Kingwood Alarm describes its monitoring as 24/7, and that kind of around-the-clock coverage is what you are relying on when no one is home.
If a house sitter, pet sitter, neighbor or plant waterer will be coming in, give each of them their own temporary user code rather than sharing yours, and delete those codes when you return. Walk them through how to disarm on entry and arm on leaving, which mode to use, and what to do and say if they set the alarm off by accident. Make sure they know the verbal passcode the monitoring team will ask for, or set up a separate one for them if your provider supports it.
Tell your monitoring company who will be visiting, so a call about an unexpected entry can be checked against a known name.
When the house will be empty, arm the system in the mode that includes interior motion detection, not the stay or home mode you might use at night. If a pet is staying home with a sitter visiting, talk to your alarm company about how to handle motion detection so the pet does not set it off while you are gone.
The alarm is your response if someone gets in. Making the house look occupied is about discouraging the attempt in the first place. Stop or hold mail and package deliveries, or ask a neighbor to collect them. Put a few lamps on timers that switch on and off at different times through the evening. Arrange for the lawn to be mowed if you will be gone long enough for it to show. Ask a neighbor to move your trash bins on collection day and park in the driveway now and then.
Hold off on posting trip photos until you are home. Pictures from a beach tell anyone watching that the house is empty.
The alarm can only report what it is set up to see. Before you leave, lock every door and window, including the ones you rarely use. Close and lock the door between the garage and the house. Make sure garage door remotes are not left in cars parked outside, and consider using the opener's lock or vacation setting, if it has one, while you are away. Put away ladders and tools that could help someone reach an upper window.
Save your monitoring company's number in your phone so you recognize it if they call. Keep your phone charged and check messages at sensible intervals. If your system sends notifications, keep them on, but rely on your contact list and the monitoring team rather than on catching every alert yourself.
Delete the temporary codes, switch the monitoring account back to your usual contacts and ask your sitter whether anything odd happened. If there were false alarms or trouble messages, note them and ask your alarm company to look at the cause.
If your trip exposed gaps, such as a door without a contact or a sitter who found the keypad confusing, use your return as a chance to fix them. A local company such as Kingwood Alarm, which lists maintenance among its services, is the kind of provider to ask for a look at the system before you travel again.