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Suggest the possibility of DIY home security systems a decade ago, and most people would probably have thought of Kevin McAllister's booby-trapped course of swinging paint-tins and electrified doorknobs in Home Alone. Indeed, visual, auto-detection and information technology was, at the time, something only lettered professionals could really muck around with (and was, even then, notoriously glitchy and unreliable).

But computers have traveled light years in the past couple of decades. Hardware glitches, though still not a thing of the past, are far rarer, and operating technologies such as media recording and storage and motion detection is now a fairly simple business, accessible to anyone with the time to skim through a short user manual or do a little browsing on the internet. You can, believe it or not, actually build pretty efficient DIY home security systems using simple webcams of the sort people use to chat online. With a little more cash in hand, you can even override issues of poor lighting by installing your own infrared security cameras.

You should keep in mind, before you get too caught up in building a DIY home security system that turns your home into a hi-tech fortress, that the most effective form of crime prevention is really simple common sense. More than half of all burglaries occur as the result of negligence - someone leaving a door or window open, or forgetting to put the alarm on. Make sure that your spouse, children, and any other residents of your home are set in the ritual of locking doors whenever they leave, even if it's only to run a quick errand.

Your next move is to have those doors or windows set off the alarm if they are somehow opened when you're not there. Your tool in this regard? Alarm contacts. These magnetic pads, one of which is secured to the door or window and the other to its frame, create a circuit that gets tripped when broken. When the circuit gets tripped, it will emit a signal to the central alarm system hub to which the contacts are tuned. Contacts are cheap - you can buy them for under ten dollars at just about any hardware store - making them ideal for creating a good DIY home security system.

If the idea of having a full-blown home security camera system is part of your consumerist dream, one neat trick you might want to keep in mind is setting up your contacts so that they activate your security cameras, putting them into recording mode the instant that the switch gets tripped. Aside from the vanity, there's truly little reason to purchase a camera more sophisticated than simple webcams to ensure that you DIY home security system covers all the various parts of your home. These are commonly sold in computer and department stores for as little as $20 (though they get powerful enough to be priced in the thousands).

The purchase of an infrared security camera, on the other hand will almost indubitably leave your wallet substantially lighter. Their benefit over night-vision cameras lies in their ability to present detailed, high-quality images regardless of lighting conditions. Infrared cameras do this by recording the black body radiation of objects, something living creatures display a lot more of than inanimate objects do. The inclusion of infrared security cameras will not only eliminate your need for smoke sensors (as they double as fire detectors) but will bring your home security camera system firmly into the 21st century, as it renders it immune from changes in lighting and atmospheric conditions.