Secure Your Melbourne Home: Advanced HiLook Alarm Systems by Sipko

The hallway is the single most valuable PIR location in a Melbourne home. Anyone who enters through a door or window has to move through or near the hallway to reach bedrooms, living areas, or anything worth stealing. A correctly positioned PIR here — high corner, angled across the corridor width — covers all that movement with a single zone.

Mount height matters: we aim for 2.1–2.4m on a corner, angled roughly 45° down and across the corridor. Lower than that and the detection angle shrinks; too high and narrow hallways create blind spots.

Melbourne’s open-plan layouts — kitchen, dining, and lounge all flowing together — are great for living but tricky for sensor coverage. A standard PIR has roughly a 110° field of view at 2.1m height, which means one sensor can cover a rectangular room up to about 12x8m if placed in the correct corner.

If the space is L-shaped or has a kitchen island breaking the sightline, a second PIR may be needed. We’d rather add one zone than leave a dead corner that an intruder can use to move through the house undetected.

The front door reed switch is typically zone 1 on every Melbourne HiLook install we do — and for good reason. Even if every other sensor is bypassed, the front door contact is the last line of detection before someone is inside. The magnet sits on the door leaf, the switch body on the frame, with a 10–15mm gap between them when closed.

For hinged timber doors, we recess the switch into the frame where possible for a clean finish. Solid-core doors are ideal; hollow-core doors can flex enough in Melbourne’s temperature swings to cause intermittent faults if the gap isn’t set right.

Rear access is the preferred entry point for most residential break-ins in Melbourne — it’s less visible from the street and more often left unsecured. If your back door is a sliding glass panel (common in Bayside and inner-southeast properties), a standard door reed works fine on the sliding frame, but make sure the magnet placement accounts for any lateral float in the sliding mechanism.

Double-leaf sliding doors need two reed switches — one per panel — if both sides can be independently opened. Victoria Police’s security advice consistently flags rear sliding doors as a common bypass point in residential burglaries.

Windows are often seen as “extra” coverage, but they shouldn’t be. A window reed switch triggers the alarm the moment the window is pried open — before an intruder even steps foot inside. We prioritise windows that face side fences or back gardens where someone has time to work without being seen from the street.

We use slimline magnets for Melbourne’s popular aluminium sliding windows or timber sash windows. They don’t interfere with the window’s operation and are almost invisible when the window is closed.

The external siren (or “Strobe/Bell”) serves two purposes: it makes a massive noise to scare people off, and the flashing strobe tells the neighbours (and the police) exactly which house is having the drama. We mount these as high as possible on the front or side elevation of your Melbourne property.

Placement is key for deterrence. If an opportunistic burglar sees a professional HiLook siren mounted properly, they’re much more likely to keep walking to the next house that looks like an easier target.