Detect thieves before they break in.

If you park on your drive or your garden at night, this idea will give you more peace of mind... though no good if you park in the street. Presumably you will have at least one PIR security light on the front of your property (hopefully mounted high enough for no one to be able to reach it and disable it. You should park where you get best coverage from the PIR. Yes, I know some scroats aren't put off by security lights; and you may not know the light is on when you are asleep. So here's what you do...... Buy a step-down transformer for an electric door bell and a bog standard cheapo door bell. ( the louder the better) Take a 240 volt feed out of your security light so that it becomes live whenever the security light comes on. At the other end of the live lead fit a 13 amp socket and plug the transformer into it then connect the twin wire lead from the transformer to the new door bell. Make sure the bell is placed where you will hear it at night. Bingo, light comes on, bell rings and you know that some warm blooded thing has been by your Landy. If you are quick enough you will see them... probably running away. OK, you will also detect cats, foxes, hedgehogs and rats. I can live with that as some of the rats I have seen have been 2 legged ones. Helped to stop someone breaking into my caravan a number of times. Oh, by the way it's best to wire in a on-off switch between the transformer and the bell; somewhere you can reach easily. And set the timer on your light so that it's on for a long time.... I have seen some maggot step out of the shadows and hurry away in the glare of the light after he got fed up waiting.
for the light to got out. If you get repeated alarms the same night without seeing any sign of life don't leave the bell switched off as the scroats will hope that is what you will do. I hope some of you will try this idea, as it will give me a great satisfaction to hear that it has saved your wheels.... and it will protect your house as well !

My 300watt security light at the rear of the house has a ding dong chimed that goes off when the light is activated. It plugs in a regular 13a socket so no batteries either.
I gave up on it though after a few weeks. I didn't appreciate the false alarms at 3am when the light hadn't even been triggered. Good idea in principal though

PIR's are ok if you don't intend getting any sleep, foxes, cats, badgers will guarantee a sleepless night. I have various deterrents that will cause some serious inconvenience to anyone entering my property during the night, the PIR (floodlight) is good in theory but not in practice. I certainly wouldn't say on a public forum what deterrents I've deployed but they do work..... as Clint Eastwood would say "make my day, punk"

Land Raver said:

My 300watt security light at the rear of the house has a ding dong chimed that goes off when the light is activated. It plugs in a regular 13a socket so no batteries either.
I gave up on it though after a few weeks. I didn't appreciate the false alarms at 3am when the light hadn't even been triggered. Good idea in principal though

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I had one of them once but I did not think the ding dong was loud enough. One good thing about it was that it would work in daylight, though I don't think the light would come on in daylight it would still chime. Funny you should say 3am, as quite a few of my activations on the bell system I'm using have been around 3am. Maybe the scroats think that the rest of us are all in a deep sleep then.