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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.