Simple ways to make your home look occupied at night

Why a dark, silent house stands out

Most burglaries are opportunistic. A would-be intruder rarely targets a specific home; they walk or drive a route and look for the easiest option. The easiest option is almost always the house with no lights on, no sound, no car on the drive and post visibly piling up behind the glass. It doesn't take much to move your home off that list. A few plug-in timers, a radio and a friendly neighbour will do most of the work, and none of it requires an expensive system or a weekend of installation. What follows is the practical version — the things that genuinely change how your home reads from the pavement.

Start with timers, then use them properly

Plug-in timers cost a few pounds and are the single most effective low-cost measure. Mechanical segment timers are simple and reliable; digital ones with a random or holiday setting are even better. Where people go wrong is treating a timer as an on/off switch for the whole house.

• Use three lamps rather than one: a lounge lamp, one in the hall or on the landing, and one in an upstairs bedroom. Three points of light at different ends of the house reads as a household going about its evening.
• Set each one differently. A lounge lamp from 4.30pm until 11pm, a hall lamp from dusk until midnight, a bedroom lamp clicking on at 10.15pm. The staggered pattern is the point.
• Change it every few days. A light that comes on at exactly 7pm for a fortnight is a schedule, not a person.
• Use LED bulbs and stop worrying about the cost. A 5W LED burning for six hours uses a fraction of a unit of electricity.

One caution: don't light the whole house. A real home always has a dark window or two, and a property glowing from every room looks more suspicious, not less.

Sound is the detail most people forget

Light alone is only half the story. A house with lamps on but absolute silence still feels empty, particularly to anyone standing at the front door. Sound is the cheapest way to close that gap.

• Tune a radio to a speech-based station rather than music. Voices — even a presenter talking to a caller — suggest someone is in the room, and they carry better through walls and doors than a music bed does.
• Keep the volume low. The aim is that it's just audible from the porch or through the letterbox, not that your neighbour can follow the discussion through a shared wall.
• Position it centrally, away from adjoining walls if you're in a terrace or flat. Good neighbours are part of your security, and you don't want to trade one problem for another.
• Plug the radio into a timer too. A radio that switches itself off at 11.30pm sounds like someone going up to bed, which is far more convincing than one murmuring all night.

Ask a neighbour to use your drive

If you have a driveway, an empty one is the loudest signal your home can send. A car parked on it, even intermittently, changes that completely — it suggests someone is in, or at least expected back shortly.

• Ask a trusted neighbour to park on your drive for an evening or two, especially on the first and last days of a trip. Those are the days when a property is most obviously empty.
• Offer to return the favour. A reciprocal arrangement is easier to ask for and easier to keep going.
• Ask them to put your bin out and bring it back in, and to push any post out of sight if it's visible through the door glass.
• No drive? Ask whether they'd park directly outside your house instead. A familiar car in the usual spot does much of the same job.

Small touches that make a house look lived in

These take minutes and add up to a picture of a home in normal use.

• Close curtains and blinds at dusk, but not all at once. Front room first, bedrooms a little later.
• Leave a pair of boots or wellies by the door and a coat on a hook in the porch if either is visible through glass.
• Keep the frontage tidy. An overflowing bin, a delivery box left out for a week or a mat covered in post all say nobody's home.
• Put a porch light or security light on a timer so the outside of the house matches the inside.
• Don't post about your trip while you're away. Waiting until you're home is the simplest security measure there is, and the one most often skipped.

An easy evening routine

None of this needs to be complicated. When you go out for the evening, leave a lamp on and the radio playing quietly — two seconds of effort. When you go away for longer, set the timers with staggered times, ask your neighbour about the drive and the bins, and check that nothing outside advertises your absence. Do that much and your home will look like what it is: a house with people in it, going about an ordinary evening. That's usually enough to send an opportunist further down the street.