Preppers: Lock Down Your Security with These Essential Doomsday PreperationTips

If you are a prepper or anyone else concerned about emergency preparedness, you likely have home security on your mind on a regular basis. However, you cannot just approach locks and security like everyone else. Instead, you need to approach these issues with a prepper mentality – If you are preparing for a doomsday scenario, here are five essential tips to keep in mind regarding locks and home security:

1. Avoid electronic locks

When buying locks for your home, you want to avoid electronic locks, biometric locks or any other locks that need power to function. In most cases, these locks have built-in battery backups so they can keep running through a short power outage, but if disaster strikes and the entire grid is disabled, the backup batteries on these locks will soon become useless.

Most of these locks, unfortunately, have subpar mechanical systems, and the mechanical portions of these locks have a reputation for being easy to pick.

2. Invest in multiple mechanical locks

Although biometric locks may seem enticing, stick with the old standby mechanical locks, and do not skimp on the number of locks you get for your home. Invest in deadbolts, chain locks and any other mechanical locks you can find, and if possible, put multiple locks on all your entry doors.

3. Support your locks with strong doors and frames

Putting multiple locks on your exterior doors is a virtually worthless practice if your doors are weak. Support your locks with strong security doors that cannot be kicked or blown in, and consider the strength of your door frames as well.

Regardless of how strong a deadbolt is, if the door frame is weak wood, a strong person can push the door and the lock so that the lock rips through the door frame. Prevent this from happening by replacing your door frames with metal frames or by reinforcing your existing frames with strips of metal that surround the casings of your locks.

4. Don't forget to secure your stockpile

Typically, when most people contact locksmiths, they only worry about securing the outside of their home from criminals, but if you are a prepper, you need to imagine the worst and prepare for the eventuality that someone may get into your house.

Once they are inside, you do not want these people to be able to get to your stockpile. Whether your stockpile is in a kitchen pantry, the basement or an extra room, you need to lock and secure that space as if it is as important as your front door.

If you have your stockpile outside in a shed or in a cellar with an entrance to the outside, you need to take special care to add locks and reinforced doors to those areas as well.

5. Consider learning basic lock picking skills

In "regular" life, lock picking has little legitimate value unless you get locked out of your home and don't want to call a locksmith. However, in the event of a nuclear disaster, a government breakdown, an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that disables the grid or any other intense apocalyptic emergency, you need all of the survival skills you can get including lock picking.

If it isn't possible to hold your ground and you have to hit the road, you may eventually encounter someone else's secured stockpile, and if you want to be able to access it, you need some basic lock picking skills.

If you have a bug-out bag or vehicle, you may even want to load your bag or vehicle with some basic locksmithing tools to help you in the event of an emergency.


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