Houston Security That Keeps Talking After the Lights Go Out

Houstonians keep time by storms. Harvey in 2017 put whole neighborhoods under water. Uri in February 2021 froze pipes in attics and exterior walls across the city. Then Beryl came ashore in July 2024 and, by CenterPoint’s own outage tracker, left about 2.2 million customers dark at its peak, with more than a million still waiting a day later. Several days on, hundreds of thousands were still sweating through a heat advisory.

Each disaster taught a slightly different lesson, but they share a technical one. A security system is only as reliable as the path its signals travel. When the power fails, the cable modem fails. When the cable modem fails, an alarm that reports only over home internet has nobody to report to. The siren may still wail in an empty house, which helps about as much as a smoke detector in a vacant lot.

The fix is called dual-path communication. The panel sends its signals over your internet connection and, separately, over a built-in cellular radio. If one path drops, the other carries the message. Pair that with a panel battery sized to ride out a long outage, and the system keeps watching the doors while the neighborhood waits on line crews.

That matters most in the days after a storm, which is exactly when an empty, dark house draws attention. Families evacuate, or decamp to a relative with a generator, and the house sits unattended with its garage door disabled and its cameras offline. With a cellular path to 24/7 central station monitoring, a door opening at two in the morning still reaches an operator, who still calls you and dispatches police.

We check the cellular signal at your address before recommending a communicator, because coverage inside a brick house in Meyerland is not the same as coverage on a Kingwood cul-de-sac. The goal is a system that tells the truth on the worst day of the year, not just on a sunny Tuesday.

For many Houston homeowners, the costliest event of the decade had nothing to do with a burglar. It was a pipe that split in the attic during a freeze, or a slow leak under a water heater that ran for a week while the family was away. Insurance paperwork moves slowly. Water does not.

Monitored water and freeze sensors are small, easy to place, and tied into the same panel as the door contacts. A leak sensor sits beside the water heater, under sinks, and near the washing machine. A temperature sensor in the attic or a back bedroom warns when the house drops toward freezing after the power fails. The alert reaches your phone and the monitoring center, so someone knows while there is still time to shut a valve.

We wrote a longer piece on what the 2021 freeze taught Texans about water monitoring. The short version: the sensors that matter are the ones that report when nobody is home.

Census figures put Houston’s owner-occupancy rate at 42 percent, which means most households rent their front door from somebody else. Renters can’t drill through a landlord’s brick, and most don’t want a system they would have to abandon at the end of a lease. Wireless sensors, a cellular communicator, and a panel that packs into a box solve both problems.

Landlords have the mirror-image problem: turnover. Every move-out means keys that might still be in somebody’s junk drawer. Smart locks let an owner retire a code in seconds instead of calling a locksmith, and they leave a log of who came and went. For apartment and townhome owners with dozens of units, multi-family security adds gate access, common-area cameras, and mailroom coverage to the same plan.

San Antonio Protection Services has been designing and monitoring security systems since 2010, licensed by the Texas Department of Public Safety Private Security Bureau under license B16898. Houston is a longer haul for our technicians than Bexar County, so we schedule visits carefully and plan installations to be finished in a single trip wherever possible.

The visit itself is unhurried. We walk the doors, windows, and garage, look at where water would go if the street flooded, check cellular strength for the communicator, and test whatever equipment the last company left behind. You get a written plan, with options, and no one asks you to sign on a tablet in the driveway. Start with a free security assessment and we will take it from there.