Doors
The three most common ways of illegally entering a house is kicking in the door, breaking a window and drilling.
Doors are the usual way of entering and leaving a residence. They should and do receive a significant amount of attention, but oddly, 90% of doors are poorly secured. Most doors sold in America frankly suck. They are either metal or wood. Ironically, solid wood doors are usually the more secure. Most wood doors are not solid one piece construction, but often cheap relatively soft light wood with an appealing veneer. Any wood door with deep sections cut out of the door for aesthetic purposes is not recommended. Most residential metal doors are a very light gauge steel of dubious quality. They are near universally hollow or foam filled. At the moment, there are no brand of doors that I would unhesitatingly recommend. It’s usually cheaper to make your own. Laminate a few sheets of decent gauge sheet steel, optionally adding insulation between layers. Glue on wood veneer for pleasing aesthetics. Use three or four decent hinges and the door should still open rather cleanly.
Even with the generally poor quality of locks on residential homes, often the locks are stronger than the door and door jamb. The most common occurrence when a door is kicked is for the latches of the doorknob and deadbolt to rip through the thin surrounding material or for the lock to rip through the door. There is a very simple and relatively inexpensive solution. Reinforce the door jamb. I highly recommend DJ Armor (http://www.djarmor.com), but other cheaper versions are better than nothing at all. Your reinforcement kit should include decent gauge metal to go on both sides of the door and a U shaped square of metal to go around the lock.
Here is a somewhat cheesy video demonstrating the product:
One thing that door lamb reinforcing kits will only somewhat help alleviate is a splitter. Basically, imagine a car jack, turned sideways. You crank the jack until the frame is warped and latches are no longer protruding into the door frame. The only solution is to have heavy structural material around the door. Good brick, strong stone, cinder block or concrete. It’s not widely used, as it’s not quick, requires specific equipment, very noticeable and not very subtle. There is a relatively easy if inconvenient solution, a cross bar on the inside of the door that well connected to the frames. It’s not a likely threat, so the solution isn’t really recommended.
If you wanted to be cost effective, you could install a more robust jamb reinforcement setup on one door and devices like “Door Club” (or any other door brace) on any other door. Door braces are pretty simple. You install a device that prevents the door from opening whatsoever when installed. They vary in quality, but they’re pretty cheap and work “well enough” if the door is reasonably well constructed. Downside, of course, is you can’t open the door from the outside and you have at least one hole in your floor.
A very obvious problem is any openings (or potential openings) within arms reach of the locks. Windows, especially. Same theory applies for mail slots, wide gaps between the door and frame. If this applies, buy and install a double cylinder deadbolt. This is a keyed opening on both sides of the door and no latch to automatically open the door. Many such deadbolts include a special “inside only” key. Most people just hang it across from the door, but well out of reach. This is a perfectly valid solution.
If the door surface is flush to the door jamb, it’s easy to shim the door. aka, the old credit card trick. Don’t actually use a credit card. A bendy piece of metal works better. You use it to trip the latch and make the door think it’s currently open. If this is truly problematic, you probably want a different door or door frame. A field expedient solution is to install metal slab covering the latch area. It can be sawed with relative ease, but it’d stop or slow a shim which ordinarily take seconds. Do not use a lever doorknob on the inside of the door if at all possible. They are significantly easier to manipulate with a wire or whatnot.
The most simple and cheapest way to help secure your door is the hinges. These are often overlooked. Use some form of security hinge. Non-removable hinges have a set screw to retain the pin that is only accessible when the door is open. Safety stud hinges have a chunk of metal that sticks out of one side of the hinge to a corresponding hole on the other side of the hinge. If the pin is removed from a safety stud hinge, the door cannot be opened due to the interfering stud. Crimped pins are riveted into place and the pin is not removable. Hinges, even really secure ones, are very cheap. $10 for top of the line hinges is not uncommon. Go insanely speedy on hinges, they’re very often overlooked.
Garage doors are another lovely weak point. Change any remote garage door opener from the default combination. Remove the emergency pull rope on the inside of the door if practical. If not practical, shorten it and do not put it in a loop that is easy to snag with a shim. When you are leaving for an extended period of time, disable the garage door opener, disengage the mechanism, and use at least one padlock on the door on the inside. I personally recommend securing any door between your garage and your house like an external door, but most people do not.
Ok, enough of that. Now onto the fun stuff, locks. If you want to go the cheaper route, buy any doorknob you like and install a very good deadbolt. You don’t want to reverse that. Doorknobs by their nature are easier to attack. For cheaper doorknobs, you can remove the handle with a set of pliers or a small sledgehammer, then use a screwdriver to turn the door mechanism. Even the best doorknobs are vulnerable to this, just requiring significantly more force or time until failure.
Deadbolts. I really, really recommend an Abloy. Obviously, I’m really into lock picking. I have never, once heard about someone picking or bumping an Abloy. Not even dubious second or third hand accounts. The only weakness I’m familiar with is a specialized drill head sold in Europe to licensed locksmiths, which is obviously and definitely not a “nondestructive entry” method. Conventional drills will work. Eventually. If they don’t burn out the drill…
Now, again, you get what you pay for. You can go with an Abloy cylinder in a third party deadbolt case, which is cheaper, $120 at http://www.bayarealocks.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=87 and is a ANSI grade 2. Or you can go whole hog, ANSI Grade 1 http://www.bayarealocks.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=28 or http://www.bayarealocks.com/product_info.php?cPath=21&products_id=28 Or you can take a step down and go with a Medeco. Medeco is first tier and it’d do you just fine. It’s used at the Pentagon, White House, etc. But it’s significantly less secure than an Abloy. Medecos are vulnerable to bumping. They are/were King of the Mountain, and folks REALLY threw themselves at it. The result is “Open In 30 Seconds” which is an entire book entirely on cracking Medeco locks. I don’t really recommend the BiLock deadbolts, though it is considered a first tier product. All three would do you just fine, I’m just being a security geek and pointing out theoretical attack vectors that are possible but pretty highly unlikely.
If you do go with an Abloy, you can almost always get your locks same keyed at little to no cost. You’d probably want that if you get a new knob set along with a new deadbolt. One bit of warning, GET EXTRA KEYS. If you lock yourself out, your locksmith is going to alternate staring at the door and staring at you. He’s expressly NOT going to be able to fabricate keys for you. That’s kinda the whole point. Oh, bonus, Abloy keys are interchangeable on the same platform. You can get any number of deadbolts, door knobs and padlocks keyed to the same key with ease. It just has to be the same line of cylinder. Elite, Protec, whatever.
Now let’s jump into the ultra paranoid realm for a second. I’m not advocating any of these, as it’s seriously overkill for any home. First is shielding. Even the best locks are vulnerable to denial of service attacks. Usually juvenile delinquents that insert glue into a lock. To prevent denial of service attempts and even more drill resistance, you want to combine an Abloy and a Drumm Security Geminy Deadbolt Shield. With a high performance drill, you might drill through both in roughly… hour or two. Mind you, that’s with the best drill and bits. A regular handheld? I dunno, eight or nine hours if at all. For even more security, Abloy offers various levels of key protection. For an extra couple bucks (per key, not per lock), you can buy a different key profile. If you bought this, only the original vendor and the factory have the replacement keys. No other vendor or locksmith could reproduce your keys. The vendors and factory would only release new keys under very strict procedures. Defense in depth. You could install a door jamb reinforcement kit on a bedroom door, and a no-key latch-only deadbolt. If someone were to break in, you’d gain extra time to secure weaponry or dial 911. Also, it is possible to remove peepholes from a door and install one in the opposite direction.
That’s enough on doors. Now onto…
Windows
First rule. Film all accessible windows or glass. If it’s on the ground floor, definitely film. If it’s on the second floor… Strongly consider it. I strongly recommend ShatterGARD (http://www.shattergard.com). Other security films may or may not be just as good, thoroughly review before purchasing. I extremely strongly recommend getting it professionally installed. It’s really easy (slap on, mist with liquid, squeegee) but you really don’t want to blotch the job.
Here is a mildly cheesy video demo:
Windows are hard to give specific advice, because they greatly vary. Consider installing real locks on the windows. You can improvise on a temporary basis by cutting some wooden dowels to size to prevent the windows from being jimmied open while you’re gone. These are excellent: http://www.esmet.com/tufloclocks.html
You could get by with any hasp and a padlock if you wanted an ugly but efficient install. Line up the hasp, use a magic marker to fill in the holes, remove hasp, drill a thin pilot hole, line up hasp again, inject in some glue, drill in nice deep wood screws of good quality. Cyanoacrylate is great, but you need to move quickly and it’s very unforgiving of error.
Full length door windows = bad. Very bad. Immediately install a double cylinder deadbolt. Even a kwikset double cylinder deadbolt would a thousand times more secure than a single cylinder Abloy deadbolt in this case. You could film the door window and it’d be ok (but not good). Consider reinforcing the window frame. I’d recommend, if financially capable, eventually replace that door. Don’t even consider a door brace for the door with a full length window. If they can SEE the door brace, they’re going to go through the glass.
Conclusion
Work from the worst problems to the mildest. You do one bit at a time if you’re financially limited or pick and choose if you feel any of the above is overkill. Just always remember, physical security is only as strong as the weakest link.
Regardless of your cash level: Wooden dowel the windows when you’re gone, secure garage when you’re gone, immediately and without delay install double cylinder deadbolt if you have glass near the deadbolt. Security hinges are a must and dirt cheap.