Who writes this

Jean-Benoit Buisson

Every page on this site is written and signed by one person. This page says who, how the judgments are reached, and — just as importantly — what he is not.

How I got here

I started keeping notes because of a mismatch I kept meeting, on product after product and in every family here: the number a thing is sold on is almost never the number that decides whether it works. A camera is advertised on its resolution, which describes daylight, while the night image is made by an illuminator nobody puts on the front of the box. A battery camera quotes months of runtime, and the assumption behind that figure — three or five triggers a day — is in a footnote, while the camera you are about to hang faces a pavement that will give it fifty. A wireless chime quotes three hundred meters, measured in open air, for a house that will ask it to cross two walls. Every page I found while looking for an answer had the same shape: a ranked list, a score out of ten, an affiliate button, and not one figure I could check against the manual.

That is the whole subject. Security equipment rarely fails outright. It quietly does less than you were told, in a way nobody discovers until the day it mattered. A camera that records nothing because the plan lapsed. A sensor that dropped off the hub in November because alkaline cells lose their voltage in the cold. A lock rated to a published grade, bolted to a frame with the two 25 mm (0.98 in) screws that came in the box, so that the timber gives way and the lock leaves with it. None of that is on the front of the packaging, and all of it decides whether the thing does its job.

So this is the page I wanted and could not find. I read what manufacturers publish, I check every product reference market by market, I follow what things actually cost — including the plan that renews every month — and I say plainly when a figure is not published at all. That last part matters more than it sounds: most of the disappointment here comes from a number nobody printed.

I keep notes — the honest specification of each family, the place where the manual contradicts the sales page, which mount fits which camera, which grade means what, and the buying mistake each category invites. This site is those notes, put in order, in five languages, because the same question is asked in French, German, Spanish and Italian and gets a far worse answer in four of them.

I am not a locksmith, a security installer or a lawyer, and I do not pretend to be. What I can do is read carefully, compare honestly, report every manufacturer figure with its source, and tell you which number the maker left out.

What this site covers

Everything listed here is taken from the catalog of this site, and each entry links to its own page. When the catalog changes, this list changes with it. It is a list of what is covered — not a list of what I own.

What I care about

Three convictions that run through this site. The number that gets quoted is usually the wrong one — a camera sold on resolution rather than on the illuminator that makes its night image, a runtime sold without the event count it assumes, a radio range measured in open air, a parcel box sold on internal volume rather than on the aperture a parcel has to pass through. What the thing costs over three years decides more than what it costs today — subscriptions renew, memory cards wear out from being overwritten every day, lithium cells go dead in unheated places, and a sealed battery on a gable end means a ladder every recharge. And the thing that matters most is rarely on the specification sheet at all: what the device does at the moment it is supposed to work, which is usually when the power is off, the internet is down, or the battery is flat.

What I am not

I am not a locksmith, a security installer, an electrician or a lawyer. I hold no qualification in any of them, I have never worked for a manufacturer or for a retailer, and nothing here rests on any professional title. This site describes a product — its construction, its materials, its published specifications — and stops there. In particular, every resistance grade, IP and IK rating, decibel figure and battery runtime on this site is reported from the manufacturer with its source named, and never derived by me. Where a maker states a safe to UL 1037, a cylinder to EN 1303 or an alarm to a VdS class, I report that the maker states it — I am not a testing body, and no product described here is presented as approved by an insurer. Whether a lock or a safe satisfies your policy is a question for your policy.

And I am emphatically not a source of legal advice. Whether you may point a camera at a shared path, what may appear in frame, how long footage may be kept and what a neighbor is entitled to ask are legal questions, answered differently in each of the five countries this network publishes in. Where a page here touches them, it describes the rule and links to the authority that publishes it — and goes no further. A confident answer from me would be worth nothing and could cost a reader a complaint from their own neighbor.

If you are looking for someone whose authority comes from a job title, this is not that site; what each judgment rests on is stated on the page it appears on, and you can read how these pages come to a conclusion in full.

How I work

Every figure names its source: a manufacturer specification, a manual, a declared standard, or the weight of long-term owner reports.
No price, product reference or specification is ever invented. Where a figure is missing, the field is left empty and the gap is stated on the page.
Product references are verified against Amazon before publication, per market. Where a model is not sold in that store, you are sent to a local search rather than to a page that does not exist.
Where the cheap option wins, the page says the cheap option wins — and where the honest answer is longer screws in the strike plate you already have rather than a new lock, it says that instead.
Nothing here is sold with fear. No page opens with a burglary statistic, and where a product changes very little, the page says so.

Why this site exists

Because home security is sold on the wrong numbers, to people who are buying it at a bad moment. A resolution is printed where an illuminator belongs. A runtime is printed without the assumption that produced it. A radio range measured across a car park is printed for a house with walls. A safe is sold on its capacity when the number that decides everything is whether it was bolted down. And the parts treated as afterthoughts — the mount, the card, the cell, the screws — are usually what decides whether the thing works when you finally need it.

There is also a part of this that is not about buying anything. The single most useful sentence on this site is that a lock delays, a camera records, an alarm alerts, and a safe buys time — none of them prevents anything. Writing it the other way round sells more equipment and leaves a reader believing something that is not true. Plenty of what improves a house here costs nothing at all: replacing the screws that came with a strike plate, moving a motion sensor off the wall that carries a radiator, aiming a camera under an eave instead of high on open wall, changing every sensor battery on one day a year instead of waiting for the notifications. Those things are cheap and almost never written down. That is the subject a page full of new equipment is guaranteed to skip. It is not skipped here.

Correcting me

If something here is wrong, tell me and I will fix it and date the correction on the page. Write to [email protected].

Jean-Benoit Buisson · Paris, France