Unless you reside in a badass underground bunker or an old refurbished missile launch control center, chances are your property and home perimeters add little to nothing to your safety and security on the whole. This is why extended perimeter security and alarms on your property during a SHTF scenario is so vital. It could give us those precious seconds we may need to protect ourselves and our families.

This article, in simple terms, and presuming that you have a piece of somewhat adequate knowledge about home protection, will be a guide, or gateway if you will, into perimeter protection. No, we will not be going into detail about home-rigged claymores, trip traps that will take limbs off, or about the costly state of the art alarm systems. The purpose here is to offer a brief understanding and knowledge of how to beef up the safety around the perimeter of your home base.

This article is not only filled with the knowledge of use in protecting the boundaries of your home. The information herein can be used anywhere you find yourself when SHTF; an encampment, your bug out location, or even where you camp along the route to your bug out place.

Safety Analysis of Where You Live

Begin this entire process by performing a safety analysis of where you live. You should carefully consider the safety situation of the area in which you live before any shtf. There are many reasons for needing to do this. It makes no difference at all how “nice” your area is, in a SHTF type scenario the safeguards you have may not be ample enough for you to brazen out.

Even during agreeable times, it can be a bit stirring to have other people walk right onto your property with no warning. It can be even more alarming to have hunters, innocent though still bearing arms, to suddenly appear on your land. It gets worse when a SHTF event takes place.

When people are put in emergencies and feel their lives are in danger, they tend to act out in ways they may never have before. This is why it matters not how nice the area you reside in is. You must pre-evaluate the safety of your area, and then proceed with preparations from there.

For instance, preppers who live on major farms will have more land and more opportunity for trespassing to concentrate on. Folks with gardens will need to consider the facts that they could be raided for food and how to counteract that potentiality. Preppers that keep livestock will also require a different sort of defense. No matter what you do or where you are, you will need good security measures to protect what you have worked hard for.

Raising the Bar on Security

As you can see any given walk of life mixed with any catastrophic or disastrous event will require a different strategy and proper steps of preparation. However, they all share one single concept:

Security

Perimeter protection safety measures will also take different levels of preparation expertise and expense.

One great way to learn about the many ways of self-defense and home protection is by purchasing one of the many books on the market in said theme. This can give you some specific information on (for example) urban home invasions or spontaneous concentrated urban rioting and looting as well how to defend and buttress your house from an outside attack. However, you cannot solely rely on books…

Why worry about perimeter security? What are the police for?

You may feel pretty protected right now, but even now it is a good idea to have some sort of perimeter protection in order. For the harder you make it for an attacker to charge you and invade your home or apartment, the better chance you have to get police on the line, to escape or to take up guns and produce a defensive counter-attack.

In some emergency scenarios (as you can surely imagine) there will not be any help, no police or emergency services, to respond to your calls of distress. Simply trusting in your doors locks and stocking up on extra food and water and “settling down for the storm” will not quite cut it in these large scale emergencies.

Nearly any house can be burglarized or broken into by relentless invaders if they are given enough time and there are no worries of police showing up on the scene. Even homes made entirely of brick and with bars or steel shutters are not entirely fortified against intrusion.

In a doomsday-like situation, even if you manage to, by the skin of your teeth, fend off the first onslaught of attackers, you can bet there will be more. That is simply the reality of things (depending upon the nature of the emergency situation, of course).

This is why it is so important to take a simple evaluation of local threat in and around your bug out/in location.

Here’s how to get started in the simplest, least expensive ways.

Also, keep in mind that if you have no business messing with certain traps or signals in perimeter protection, do not attempt them. Proper training and handling courses are necessary for some things. Unless you can live with a few fewer fingers… As always, apply your common sense.

Perimeter Protection

Creating a protective, live defense perimeter around your residence could potentially ensure your long term survival chances. If you set up you barrier protection correctly, you have more potential of keeping those random stragglers from even finding your place. And if they do, that barrier will keep them at bay long enough for you to put to use some of that firepower, ammo and other resources you have acquired for that purpose.

History has proven that one of the most difficult obstacles/barrier to infiltrate or breach by humans (without any heavy destructive equipment, of course) are walls.

Unfortunately, it is always very much expensive to put up a wall all the way around your place. Sometimes a bit of common sense served with a dose of ingenuity can serve you well. Improvise, good sirs!

Trust that you are going to want your perimeter barrier to be a circle of defense that is pretty much as far out as your property goes (unless you live on a hundred acres out in Nowheresville). This is opposed to allowing them to get extremely close to your main retreat. If an intruder can’t move forward and gain access to you in your actual shelter, then you will have created a sufficiently protected perimeter.

Perimeter Alarms

Ah, early-warning devices. Anti-intrusion signals. Perimeter alert alarms are devices rigged to set off a series of noises, the sign that someone has crossed a boundary. These alarms can be built on a range of different styles and designs, spanning in price from a twelve pack of beer to state of the art units.

In this article, we will only discuss the inexpensive ways to rig your perimeters with noise-making alarms.

Side note:

Only make certain alarms if you are at that particular level of achievement.

Do not attempt to make anything that may hurt you or others without first being trained accordingly.

One thing to keep in mind when rigging your perimeter alarms is what sort of animals you may have in the immediate area. Yes, animals can set off traps, signals and devices just as easily as a human.

Typically, the first thing people love to envision when thinking of perimeter protection is pyrotechnics. And obviously, they are a time tested and trustworthy form of alert. They often tend to perform dual purposes, for they can act as a shock impediment, slowing the attacker’s progression.

These, however, should only be used and rigged if you know what you are doing. While using these, you must regard the potential risk of forest fires. Be wary when using any sort of flare setups.

The best route to take with alarm type systems is low tech devices. Devices that have minimal mechanical devices. Keeping it simple and efficient will make these sorts of alarms far more useful in every type of scenario.

Use tin cans filled with a few small pebbles tied together with strings. Yes, surely you have seen these in some Deliverance type movie, but they really do work. Set up a low-cost trip wire device that triggers a blank shotgun shell to explode.

Incorporate some protective outdoor dogs to your perimeter protection arsenal. Use metal pie plates in the same way you do the tin cans (this method also really, really helps if you implement it to your garden’s barriers as well).

Recommended article: 10 Dog Breeds for Personal and Home Protection

Going back to the thought on animals tripping your alarms: Don’t be too peeved if a deer happens to trip your noise alarms, the alert of the animal may just be your very own personalized ‘dinner bell’ ringing!

Seeing as how large fireworks, say like rapid fire tube clusters and bursting skyrockets, are perfectly legal to buy, it may be a good idea to go ahead and stock up on them. Not only do they make 4th of July celebrations with your wild cousins more interesting, but they also make for excellent perimeter alarms and deterrents.

Another good way to stun and surprise an intruder is by strategically using the old magic cube camera flashbulbs. They are mechanical, so there is no battery involved. These will surely mess up any sort of night vision being used.

And now for a very interesting one: Guinea Fowl. They can be thought of as a last resort, too close for comfort alarm. They aren’t much for distance recon, as they like to be close to the home, and will only be of use in letting you know that someone has made it into the ‘yard’.

They are a fairly self-sufficient bird, about chicken-sized. And if worse came to worst, they can be pretty tasty (that is if you don’t mind their likeness to dark meat chicken); they also produce eggs that are nearly as tasty as chickens. When something comes too close for their comfort, they make a racket and a raucous hullabaloo that could wake the dead.

They can, at times, be more reliable than a good ole guard dog. Snakes? Watch for em to circle up and get real noisy. Dogs? Up on a roost, but the same alarm calls. An unwelcome human? Same thing.

Perimeter Intrusion Obstructions

Intrusion obstructions refer to things that will help to deter anyone from ever even attempting to enter your boundaries. Think of a fence or wall. That is the principle here; only high chain link fences or barbed wire fences are not only extremely pricey, but they are very easy to breach, you’ve only got to be a good climber or have a pair of wire snips.

You must take in consideration of the psyche during times of distress (and before). If you make your home look like a FEMA prison camp, it will feel like one as well. The eyesore can actually make your experience during the SHTF scenario all the more dreadful.

And again, these will not do much to keep humans out (unless of course it is electrified, but this will have to be of the same standard that prisons use to be even slightly sufficient). Going this route will actually be drawing more attention to you, your family and your bug out/in location.

There are a plethora of inexpensive fencing ideas, such as pyramids of tangled concertina-type razor wire rolls. These, depending upon how much perimeter you have to cover, can prove to be pretty pricey as well. As mentioned at the beginning of this article, we will be discussing the cheap(er) way to protect your perimeter.

Therefore, your true best bet is to know how to create a “natural” perimeter barrier obstruction. The best way to begin is to get to know your perimeter.

If you live out in the sticks, a natural barrier will serve two purposes:

• first, the obvious, making it difficult for an intruder to get onto your land,
• secondly, it will serve to keep any stay wanderers from ever being intrigued, to begin with.

Related reading: Home Defense at its Finest

Begin by strategically placing old, felled trees in piles randomly along the perimeter. Next, start intertwining branches and bramble in among the logs. The idea here is to make it look as natural as possible. You can get pretty damn technical with this type of barrier, all the while staying far below budget.

As you build this natural fence, if you can swing it here and there, get a bundle of razor wire or good old fashioned barbed wire, or even use boards with exposed nails, and intertwine them into the fence.

Remember that you will always want a couple of ways out, as you never want yourself entirely trapped in your own compound. As you construct the fence, make a few points that can be used as exits; low enough not to be noticed from the outside, and small enough that they can be “plugged” until ready to use.

If, by chance, the to-be-intruders keep following the camouflaged fence, knowing that there is something on the inside, make your “fence” so that they are led to a single opening. This point will be the total focus of your “fire-line” (you get the picture).

If you construct your natural fence properly, it will be nearly impossible to traverse over them without falling, tripping, and twisting yourself into some sort of awful injury and entrapment. Then, waiting like a snake in the tall grass, hidden bails of tanglefoot and concertina wire lay in wait.

Their best bet is to follow along with the wall until they reach the funnel point, where it becomes their worst, most appalling bet: reading the sign face to face that claims “no warning shot due to the fall-out of the ‘real world.’”

Defensive Counter Attack Booby Traps and Other Devices

Here is the deal; you shouldn’t even waste your time and energy meddling with man-trapping devices (huge snares, deadfalls, spiked pits, etc.). These are extremely labor intensive, they waste time, and for the majority of the time, they don’t even work. Not to mention they run the risk of potentially hurting an innocent person if you construct them before any shtf.

Sure they may have worked in the old school guerilla warfare of wars in the past, but that was only due to lack of resources.

Further General Advise for perimeter protection

Always remember to not trap yourself in your rush to keep others out. Always leave yourself an alternate regression point in your perimeter barrier.

You should try to maintain good to decent relationships with your neighbors. Be sure that they sort of know what is ‘normal’ for your property.

This can ensure that they will report unusual events that take place if you happen to be away. And perhaps they can call the police if need be. Also, by maintaining a good relationship with neighbors, you never know when one will quickly come to your much-needed aid.

Perhaps consider making your place look a bit less attractive. After SHTF, you can throw old, random junk over the lawn to make it appear as though it has already been ransacked. Maybe keep a few of those ‘bio-hazard’ and ‘radon’ signs on your windows.

Another very good practice to keep in mind when it goes down is to practice “darken ship” during the nighttime. Make it truly look as if no one is home.

Conclusion

These tips are considered some of the cheaper ways of handling perimeter protection, which may be dire to know. In some scenarios, as you can imagine, high tech gear may not be so useful.

However, if you can swing it, might as well do it! At least it is worth looking into all the different methods of keeping your perimeter under lock and key when SHTF.

Good luck out there, and remember what they say about pyro’s. If they aren’t already missing a few fingers or an eye, they soon will. Use extreme caution and that ole noodle of yours for things that go “boom”.

The article ” Perimeter Protection Assurance – Smart Tips” has been written by Jonathan Blaylock for Prepper’s Will.

Other Useful Resources:

Learn how to Safeguard your Home against Looters

Knowledge to survive any medical crisis situation

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