The Old Trick Is Back: Why Your Power Going Off Could Be The First Sign Of A Break-In

It is a familiar and painful scene. A family returns from a weekend away, or a business owner unlocks up on a Monday morning, only to find that their property has been ransacked. Drawers pulled open, rooms searched from corner to corner, and no obvious sign of forced entry from the street. For our teams on the ground, this pattern has become increasingly familiar in recent months, and it almost always starts the same way: with the power quietly switched off.

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An Old Method, Making A Comeback

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It is one of the oldest tricks in the book, and it is working again. Instead of forcing a door or smashing a window in full view of the street, suspects are targeting the property's power supply first. They will switch off the mains at an outside distribution box, or simply cut the cable feeding the house or business. Then they wait.

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Most alarm systems run on backup battery once mains power is lost, giving continued protection for a number of hours. Suspects who understand this will disappear from the scene and return later, once they judge the battery has run low or flat. By then, the alarm has little or no power left to sound, and there is nothing obviously wrong from outside the property. The entry that follows is often quiet, unhurried, and difficult to detect until someone physically checks the premises.

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What Our Teams Are Seeing

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Reviewing incidents from our control room over the past few months, this pattern comes up again and again, across homes, farms, and businesses in our area.

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In Newton Park, suspects climbed into the yard of a business, opened the circuit breaker cover, and deliberately switched off the power before making their move. They waited for the alarm's backup battery to run down, then forced their way in through the back. When the property waschecked, the entire premises had been searched from office to office.

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In another incident in Summerstrand, a suspect scaled a boundary wall and went straight to the outside mains switch before attempting entry through a window. In Sydenham and surrounding suburbs, our patrol teams and control room have picked up several cases this year where cut cables or tampered power boxes were the first indication that something was wrong.

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Not every one of these incidents ends badly for the suspects involved. In Kamma Park, a client noticed their outside power box standing open and immediately phoned our control room to report it, describing exactly this build up before anything further happened. Because he raised the alarm early and stayed in contact with us, response was placed on high alert for that property, and no loss occurred. That kind of early call is exactly what makes the difference.

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What "AC Failed" Actually Means

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This is why the phone call our control room makes when a system reports "ACFailed" matters so much. It means your alarm system has detected that it is no longer receiving power from the mains, and it has switched over to run on its backup battery. It does not always mean something sinister is happening. Most of the time, it is simply a power outage, and in our area, that happens often.

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That is exactly what makes this call tricky to take seriously every single time. When outages are a regular part of life, an AC Failed alert can start to feel routine, even easy to ignore. But given what our teams are seeing on the ground, that call deserves a moment of your attention every time it comes through. It costs nothing to answer, confirm what is happening, and let our control room know whether it is a general area outage or something worth a closer look.

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What You Can Do

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A few small habits go a long way toward closing this gap:

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Answer the call when our control room contacts you about an AC Failed signal, even if you assume it is loadshedding or a local outage. A quick confirmation from you helps us decide whether backup patrols or a closer check are needed.

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If you notice your outside power or alarm box has been tampered with, standing open, or looks disturbed in any way, contact us immediately, as our Kamma Park client did.

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Consider having your outside power box and cabling inspected and secured, particularly if it is easily reached from outside your boundary wall.

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Where possible, extend your alarm's backup battery capacity or add battery-independent detection, so that a power interruption does not leave your property unprotected for long.

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