DIYControls

Everyone loves summertime, and being mindful of summer safety is the best way to make the season even more enjoyable. As you gear up for the warmer weather, longer days and much anticipated family vacations, take a moment to review these suggestions and DIY products that will help keep your family happy and safe during the summer months.

Do you ever wonder if you heard your front door or garage open and then begin to panic that someone is in the house? Or, maybe you're the parent of young children and worry that they may have slipped out of the house unsupervised. With an entry alert installed at your front door, back door or garage, you can be notified each time someone enters or exits the house.

The primary reason to get a driveway alert is to detect when a vehicle or person enters or leaves your driveway, but there are a lot of other ways you can use your driveway alert. Driveway alerts are detection systems that have two main components – a sensor that gets installed next to the driveway and a receiver that is located indoors.

While the majority of drowning accidents involve young children, medically-frail seniors and handicapped persons are also at high risk of drowning or near-drowning injuries, tragedies that can be prevented by better caregiver supervision and the use of a pool alarm. Water is a great source of therapy for handicapped and older persons because it can restore agility and strength and improve circulation, but backyard pools must have the right pool safety equipment to be truly beneficial.

Installing a temperature sensor alarm (also called a freeze alarm) is a good way to protect your vacation home from temperatures that are too high or too low, but did you know that some freeze alarms can do a lot more than just monitor temperatures? Some functions require the addition of a simple accessory like a sensor, while others are conveniently built right in.

Thanks to a key safe lockbox that contained the key to the front door, emergency medical crews were able to gain immediate access to the home of an unconscious patient in Franklin Township, N.J. last January. The homeowner had the foresight to register the combination code for the lockbox with the Franklin Township police department and that allowed the first responders to get into the house in seconds to render aid, without having to break down the door or smash a window.

A pool alarm is one of the most effective ways to prevent backyard drowning of unsupervised children or pets. Once a child slips under the water, it only takes minutes for her to lose consciousness, followed soon by permanent brain damage or death. To prevent an accidental drowning in your backyard, get a pool alarm that will alert adults of the emergency so they can intervene, before it's too late.

Elderly seniors who live alone need a way to get emergency help quickly, but with so many different personal emergency response systems on the market today, you really need to do your homework and compare all of the features before buying or leasing. That's what my friends Bob and Kate Gibson did when Bob's father became a widower and insisted on staying in his own home and living independently.

The projection clock we gave my elderly mother was the perfect solution to her nighttime dilemma of not being able to read the bedside clock. Because it was so hard for her to roll over in bed, she had difficulty maneuvering so she could face the clock. And even if she was able to position herself to see the clock, she still couldn't read the numbers without her reading glasses on!

With drowning ranked as the second leading cause of unintentional death to children nationwide, you would think more homeowners would make pool safety a priority. Sadly, three-quarters of all pool- or spa-related fatalities involve children under the age of 5 according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. In California, drowning is the number one cause of accidental death for children ages 1 to 4 years old!