December hits and suddenly security checks are bottom of everyone’s priority list. You’re trying to get last minute orders out, organise the Christmas party and finish projects before the break. The alarm system? Yeah, that’ll be fine. CCTV? It was working last week. Fire alarm? Hasn’t gone off all year so it’s probably alright.
Then you lock up for two weeks and hope for the best.
We see it every single year. Business owners who thought everything was sorted come back in January to discover they’ve been broken into, their cameras weren’t recording, or their alarm’s been screaming for days and nobody knew.
What a brilliant start to the new year.
What Goes Wrong
People don’t deliberately ignore security, they just get busy and assume everything’s working because it hasn’t obviously failed yet.
Your intruder alarm has been set every night for months. Must be fine, right? Except three of the sensors stopped working in October and you never knew because nobody broke in. Until they did over Christmas when your building was empty and half your ground floor wasn’t covered.
CCTV’s recording away. Or is it? Your storage filled up weeks ago and it’s been overwriting footage every 48 hours. Someone breaks in on Christmas Eve, you go to check the footage on the 2nd of January, and it’s already gone.
Access control looked fine. The door locks every night when you leave. What you didn’t know is the override’s been stuck on since November when a contractor was working late. Your “secure” door’s been unlocked every night for six weeks.
This stuff happens all the time.
The Real Risks
Empty buildings are targets. Everyone knows businesses shut over Christmas. Your place sits there in the dark for a week or two with nobody around. If someone’s going to try their luck, that’s when they’ll do it.
Break ins aside, there’s the operational stuff that goes wrong when buildings are unoccupied. Heating fails, pipes burst and flooding damages stock and equipment. Fire breaks out from an electrical fault, alarms malfunction and trigger false callouts that cost you money and get you in trouble with the fire brigade.
All preventable if you’d checked everything was working before you left.
What Needs Checking
Your intruder alarm wants testing properly. All sensors, all detectors, control panels, monitoring connection, backup battery, the lot. Not just “did it beep when I pressed the button?”
CCTV needs looking at. Is every camera working? Actually recording? Have you got enough storage for two weeks of footage? Can you access it remotely if you need to? Are the night vision settings right for December darkness?
Access control and door entry systems fail quietly. Doors that should be locked aren’t. Electronic locks stop working and gates jam. You won’t know unless you check them.
Fire alarms don’t take holidays, detectors need testing, monitoring needs verifying and backup power needs checking. Emergency lighting needs confirming it’ll actually come on if there’s a fire while you’re shut.
It takes a couple of hours to check everything properly. It takes weeks to sort out the mess if you don’t.
The Stupid Mistakes
Someone props a fire door open on the last day because they’re carrying stuff to their car and forgets to close it. The building’s left insecure for the entire break.
Alarm codes get given to the cleaner, the maintenance bloke, that contractor who was fixing the heating. Nobody changes them over Christmas. You’ve now got five people outside your business who can disable your alarm.
A CCTV camera gets knocked during the pre Christmas clean. Nobody notices it’s now pointing at the ceiling instead of the car park. It’s completely useless but you won’t find out until something happens and you check the footage.
Access cards go missing. Someone loses their fob but doesn’t report it because they can’t be bothered with the paperwork before Christmas. That card’s still active and can open your doors while you’re closed.
Basic stuff but catches people out every year.
What We’ve Actually Seen
A warehouse closes for Christmas. Someone breaks in on Boxing Day and steals equipment worth fifteen grand. The owner checks the CCTV and the system hadn’t been recording for three weeks. The storage was full, there’s no footage and the insurance company asks questions. Big questions.
Office building, alarm goes off at 3am on New Year’s Day. The monitoring company tries calling the emergency contacts. The first number’s disconnected, the second goes to voicemail, the third belongs to someone who left the company in September and the fourth person’s abroad and can’t get to site. The fifth finally answers, has no idea where the building even is because they’re new, nightmare!
A school closes for the holidays. The boiler packs in and the temperature drops. Pipes freeze and burst. This should have triggered the fire alarm’s temperature monitoring. It would have if anyone had tested it recently. They hadn’t. Batteries in the panel were dead. Nobody knew until staff came back to find three classrooms flooded.
A restaurant shuts over New Year. The back door gets forced. Thieves take commercial kitchen equipment and stock. The alarm should have triggered but the sensor on that door had failed a month earlier. Nobody tested it so nobody knew.
These aren’t made up horror stories, this is stuff that actually happens.
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