We all know how cool mountain bikes are, but actually that's a bit of a problem because they're highly
sought-after by thieves because they're very easy to sell on and make good cash. Now, even if you keep your bike at home there's a lot more to
keeping your bike safe than simply chucking it in the garage and closing the door. So, we're going to take you through some of the best security tips for keeping an eye on your pride and joy. (high tech tone) There are a lot of different elements that go into keeping
your bike safe and secure so I'm going to break this
video down into a few sections. It's going to include
where you keep your bike and where you store your bike, how you lock your bike up and the things that you lock it up with, and then some additional protection and other things you might
not necessarily think of on a day to day basis. Let's start with where
you keep your bikes. (downtempo music) Depending on where you live, you're probably going to keep your bike either inside your house, in the garden, perhaps in the shed or
some sort of outbuilding, in a garage, or perhaps
in some kind of workshop if you have something on
the side of your house. Now, even if your bikes
are kept inside your house, you're still at risk
because most bike crime is actually targeted, so that suggests that
perhaps people follow you to where you live or
they know where you live or things like that. So, it's up to you to make sure your house or wherever you keep your bike is as secure as it can possibly be. So, with basics with the house, obviously means having decent
security on your house. That means good locks, modern locks on the front and back of the house. A house alarm is a great idea to have. And of course you're going
to need things like insurance for your bikes which we'll go into a little bit later in the video. Now if you keep your bike
in the garage outside, then there's a few things you
need to take into account. Obviously a concrete building
is going to be fairly secure, but the weak point is
going to be the door. So, you need to make
sure your door is strong and has a good lock on it, and it's definitely worth considering having a garage door defender. Now a defender is a
kind of additional lock to mean that the door can't actually open. Now many mountain bikers
use the common garden shed to keep their bikes in. This is absolutely fine if
you have a secure garden because most likely people
have to come through your house in order to get there, but if you have any sort of side access or any way that people
can get into your garden, then you definitely need
to make sure your shed is really, really secure, so you're going to have
some decent sort of shed locks on there. Something like this, a
quality disc-style lock. It's not going to corrode
when you leave it outside in the garden, and the key
mechanism works really well. But more importantly,
you really should have an anchor point in there. Something to lock the bikes to, something solid, like a
purpose built ground anchor. If you're going to have one of these in the shed in the outside, then you really need to
have a concrete base. These are designed to be
used outside and inside. They're corrosion resistant,
and once you fit them you can pretty much forget about them, so it will be perfectly sensible to lock your bike to one of these, and then you can have some
kind of shelter over your bike. So, you could just have a
sheet to keep the moisture away from your bike, or you could go the whole
hog and get yourself a dedicated bike storage unit. So, these can be in the
form of metal cupboard or metal lockers. There's a company called Asgard that make really industrially strong ones, and they're compatible with
things like ground anchors. You can even get ones that
got electricity points in there for charging
e-bikes and your bike lights and things like that. Now, once your bikes can be locked up and safe on the inside of your house, it doesn't necessarily
mean your house is safe. So something actually
quite nasty to talk about is a thing called the thieves code. Now, if you want to learn more about this, I'm putting a link underneath this video to Abus Cycling, so that is the general manufacturer of locks and all things bike security. They've written a whole
article about the thieves code, so I suggest you read that. But what is the thieves code? Let's just put this into perspective. You might be coming
home from a riding trip with your mates and you don't realize, but you've been followed
by someone in a car. Now that person will note where you live and then they might make
some kind of marking on the outside of your
house for another thief, or another person to
come back and then later correlate that to which house
it is that has the bikes in and then let themselves
in and nick your stuff. Now this is also something
to do with organized crime. There's loads of different sort of acronyms and hieroglyphics and codes and stuff that they use, but just to show you a few that
have been used in the past. If you see any markings like this on the outside of your building,
like near the front door, or somewhere that can be
seen easily passing by, take a photo of them and
report them to the police, and then make sure you erase them and just sort of pay attention. Be very vigilant with security. Pretty nasty things to deal with. (downtempo music) Now, let's take a look at locks. Now, there's a few different
styles of locks available on the market and there's
various different price points. My advise really is to not skimp. Buy the strongest and heaviest
duty locks you possibly can because really, even though
they cost a few hundred quid, they might seem excessive, how much is your bike worth? So, let's take a look at the
three main types of locks you can get and how you
might use them at home. So, first up, you're
going to get a U-lock, sometimes called a D-lock. Now, whilst these are incredibly strong and they're available at
different price points, you may as well take advantage of getting a bigger and stronger
chain lock for home use because whilst these are excellent, they're very limited on how
much you can do with them. Great for locking your bike
around a lamp post or similar, and great for mounting to your bike, but not necessarily
the best ones for home. For home, you may as well
go all in and get yourself a heavy duty chain lock. There's several brands on the market and there's several styles,
prices and options out there. Something else you might want to consider is getting a cable lock in addition. Now, cables are typically extender locks. You shouldn't use these in place of one of the other mentioned locks. These are simply used to go
through wheels and frames as much as possible to
make making your bikes essentially the hardest thing to do. Now with locks, there's
various different price points and standards of lock, depending
on which country you're in. In UK and a lot of Europe, we use a thing called Sold Secure. There's a little label you'll find on the back of the packaging and it will be rated
gold, silver or bronze. Bronze being the cheapest
and gold being the highest. Now, those ratings correlate
directly to the value of the bike that you're locking up, and how much you're insurer
may or may not pay out, in the event of it being stolen. So, it's really important to
make sure you correlate that and spend decent money on a
lock to protect your bike. But like I say, all locks are good and all locks are better than no locks, but for home take advantage
of having a heavy duty chain. And save the D-locks and other style locks for out and about. In addition to having the strongest and most secure locks you can, make sure that you use them correctly because how you use them
actually is as important as having a good lock in the first place. Now, all locks will come with a master key and at least one spare key. Perhaps two or three. Make sure you note down
the number of the key and register it if the lock
company you're buying from has a way of registering online, because if you do manage to lose the keys, that's the only way you're
going to be able to retrieve it, which is why you need to
make a note of the number as well as registering it. Now, make sure you split
your keys up as well, so your day to day keys you might have, like myself, I have two
or three different locks. I keep those keys together
in a secret location that is not in the same
room as I keep my bikes for obvious reasons. And make sure your spare
keys are kept somewhere else in the house. Keep them safe, preferably in a safe, or something like that. Make sure you lock your
bike to something immovable. It could be a heavy duty work stand that's bolted to the ground. It could be part of your
house, or preferably, a ground anchor that's
specifically designed for that, but we're going to get
to that in a minute. Now, also, you need to make sure when you do lock your bikes up, you think about a few things because the way the thieves
will be breaking locks, there's various different methods. So, sometimes they may freeze the locks and smash them with a hammer. They still have to break
the lock at that point. Now if the locking mechanism
is quite close to your frame, it's quite unlikely that they're
going to use that method. Another method might be
to lever the locks open with a big bar or to use a bottle jack, the sort of jack you get on a car, so try not to give them the space in order to do that. And the final thing, to
get around angle grinders and bolt croppers is to
make sure that your locks aren't on the ground or any
position where they can get any point of leverage on them. Basically make it as hard
as possible for someone to get to the locks. And the same if you have an anchor point, make sure it's tucked away. Don't leave it in the middle of the room where they can work on it. You want to make this hard for them. (downtempo music) Now, to make sure you're locks
are as effective as possible, the best way is to have
a dedicated anchor point and that means having
some sort of ground anchor like one of these. Or perhaps a wall anchor. You can mount these on the wall, or you can get a dedicated
wall anchors like this one. Your bike actually hangs from this, so if you're limited on space, you'll get your bike out the way. These can work out quite well. There's various different
types on the market. As you can see, I've got
a ground anchor in place down here with a big heavy
duty gold secure lock on this one. I use this in combination with
a whole bunch of other locks which I basically daisy
chain my bikes together and then I lock them to this lock which is locked to the floor. So, ideally there's as many
locks in place as possible. (downtempo music) CCTV, now this might sound
like a bit of an extreme option but if you have a garage or an outbuilding that is separate from your house, then this might be the
ideal solution for you, and it's also a very good deterrent. Now, there's a lot of
different systems available on the market, operate
in very different ways. No one system is the
best for any one person, so you got to identify what
works best with your property, what it can see, the conditions
it's going to operate in, and of course how usable it is. So, just for example, these two here. This one has a hard drive
that's got a monitor on it and records on to this. It has an encrypted radio
signal from the camera to this. So, in real time it is filming. At any point it can loop around, so much like you would have
a dash camera in the car, so you're not having to
use new cards all the time. And you can also access
those remotely from apps. So this is a really cool system. It's an infrared camera on here. It will work outside, no problem. It's fully waterproof. This is an all-in-one. This is a little bit different. This one works on its own wi-fi signal, or it can go for an own LAN sort of ethernet cable system, depending on how you want to set it up. There's a card on the
actual camera itself, but also via cloud services
and your mobile app. You can get all of the
information directly to your phone which means if anything happens you can screen grab and send that directly to the authorities. So, there are a lot of
different systems out there. And of course you could go the whole hog and have a fully-wired system, but something in particular
that is definitely worth factoring in is the type of lenses that they operate on and
the resolution of them. So, I would say at minimum you want something that's full HD. You want something that's
going to work on infrared so you can see at night. And also, you might want
something like a wide angle and also a standard angle. The reason for that is a wide
angle whilst is very good for seeing a huge area of space, it could quite hard
for facial recognition, whereas if you had a standard lens aimed at your one weak point, let's just say it's in the garage, the weak point is the door. There's more chance you're going to get a decent resolution still
image of the culprit, so just take that into account. Like I said, there's a
lot of different systems. Make sure whatever you get works for you. (downtempo music) Insurance, now you'd be a mad man to not have your bicycles insured. They cost so much money these days. You'd really be an idiot not to, so definitely look into all
the options available to you. There's various bike-specific
insurance companies, but more often than not, you can add onto your house insurance, but they will be very specific about the policy and the payout terms and all that sort of stuff. What you'll normally find is that they will want to know description of where your bike is locked. They'll want to know the
details of the building it's in, if it has windows, all that sort of stuff. And if you have a ground anchor, they'll want a photo of the
ground anchor being used. They'll want to see what
sort of locks you've got. They'll want the serial numbers and things like that of your bikes. So, make sure you have all
of that information to hand to get the best possible quotes. And definitely shop around as well because it's pretty unlikely
the first place you ring is going to give you the
most competitive quote, but I can assure you it's
definitely worth having decent insurance for your bikes. It might be really cool
in the comments below to help all your other viewers out if anyone can add any advice on various different countries like the US or maybe in Germany or
wherever you're watching from, what sort of situations and
what insurance companies have worked best for you. Let's try and make this sort
of a group sort of a thing, so everyone helps each other. Let us know in the comments underneath. (downtempo music) Now, in Europe we have a system available called data tag. It's essentially a forensic
marking system for your bike, and once it's marked it can
be tracked virtually anywhere. It dramatically reduces the chances of you losing your bike if it is stolen. They can be retrieved. And it's one of the ones
that's actually enforced by a lot of insurance companies. They will quite often only insure you if you have data tag in place. That's certainly for UK and Europe. I know in the US there's
a similar GPS system called SureLock. Again, there's different
options available to you. But definitely check
out all of the systems. At the end of the day, you want to make it as hard as possible to
have your bike nicked. And they come with markings for the bike that display that it's got a
data tag system installed to it and they're tamper-proof as well. And those alone can be a deterrent from having your bike nicked. So, definitely look into things like that. (downtempo music) Now, you can do everything
that we've mentioned so far, and still you have to
apply some common sense to make sure your bike stays safe. So firstly, you need to
make sure that your entrance to your house is secure
because if that's not secure people can still get in. And likewise, if you're aware
that there are people around that can identify that
you're on a good bike when you return home, maybe
do a lap, go around the block. Don't always return
straight into your house so they know where you live. The same applies if you're
leaving maybe a trail center when you come home from riding, you notice anyone following you, although this might be
a super rare occasion, or you might not have even
heard of this happening, it does happen so just be
vigilant about this sort of stuff. The same applies as to where
you're putting your bike in the car, perhaps in your driveway, or unpacking your bike. You never know who's watching, so just take care of that sort of thing. You might live in a
perfectly nice neighborhood, but you can still get
dodgy people driving past and just take note of the
house number you lived in, so be very careful with
that sort of stuff. Now, another common sense thing is take note of the frame
number of your bike. You'll be surprised how few
people actually do this. Whenever you get a bike
there is a frame number on the frame. It is sometimes and quite often
on the bottom bracket shell but it can be inside the rear dropout. There's a number of different
locations it can be on a frame and it's completely unique to your bike, so that means your bike can be
traced if the bike is found, and it has been stolen for example, and you will need that number
for insurance purposes, and you'll also need it if
your bike does go missing to report to the police. So, please make sure you
note down your frame number. So, when you have a good setup. You got your ground anchors, you got your bikes daisy chained together and locked to the anchor, take some photo evidence of that, and also make sure you
have up to date photos of all of your bikes if
you have more than one, or of your bike if you only have one. And the reason for that
is if it does go missing, straight away you have an image you can share on social media, or you can share it with the police or anyone relevant to help
you retrieve your bike. But whilst you're at it, make sure you turn off
your GPS on your phone if you're taking pictures of
your bike at your property. So, any of you that take
photos for bike cable, any of you that take photos for Bike Vault on the Dirt Shed show, make sure you turn off location services on your phone when you use the camera, or at least disable them
just for your camera. And the same goes if you use Strava or any sort of ride tracking apps that are available out there. There's a lot of them. Make sure that you don't
use it from your front door. You can set privacy zones on Strava, but I would still not
completely trust that. I would go for a ride first, then start your official ride tracking, and then return at that
point, and then return home. You really don't want any
way that you can be traced back to where you live. Now, just a few last little things to say. If you have heavy duty power tools in your workshop for example, it's a good idea to keep them locked away or perhaps in a different location from where you lock your bikes, just in the event that
something bad could happen. If you have any of those sort
of feelings about any stuff, use your instincts, you know? Close your blinds at night
so people can't see in. Make sure you got cages over your windows. Lock your doors, use CCTV, have
alarms, have anchor points. Look after your pride and joy. There you go. You can never be too secure, so make sure you look after your bikes. Get some good quality locks. Make sure your bikes are insured. Perhaps even look into the realm of CCTV. Lock it, don't lose it. All right, well there you go. That's the basics of home security and all the things you
should be factoring in to make sure your bikes are nice and safe. For a couple of useful videos, well firstly, click up
here if you want to learn how to install a ground
anchor and use it correctly. And make sure you keep an eye out on GMBN Tech for the following video which is all about locking
your bike up in public, the styles of locks, and how thieves can actually break them. As always, don't forget to
give us a thumbs up here at GMBN Tech. We love having you guys around. Let us know what you think
in the comments below, and like I said earlier in the video, if you've got any suggestions for insurance companies for bikes, on a global basis it will be great to help all of the rest of the
viewers out down there in the comments section. And don't forget to share and subscribe. Cheers, guys.
