How To Make a Simple Tripwire Alarm to Protect Your Homestead

Whether you live on a densely populated urban street or you’ve got a few acres out in the countryside, you might be worried about intruders. Why not build a tripwire alarm to keep them out?

While I’m not personally a fan of being overly paranoid, when you’re growing a permaculture style homestead, there’s loads of things you’d rather not have just anyone stepping on (or over, or through!). From tender new veggie beds to your pollinator habitat, having the neighborhood dogs running through them won’t work.

Short of shelling out big bucks to install a fence, or waiting years for your hedge to grow, you can easily make a tripwire alarm instead.

A tripwire can be made of anything from fishing line to coated metal wire, or even yarn.

You use it by running the wire across the entrance to your property, either a few inches above ground level, or around chest height, depending on what you’re mainly concerned with keeping out (people or animals)!

However, in this case, we don’t want to literally trip anyone or tangle up anything. We just want the line to “trip” an alarm sound, which will scare off anything nearby and let us know our homestead’s being disturbed.

The video above shows a way to make a tripwire alarm using a clothespin, battery, superglue and a bread tie–but it doesn’t explain how to hook the battery up to something that makes noise.

For an even easier solution, this video shows how you can go out and buy one of these key chain alarms that sounds when the card is removed. Or, you can buy one here.

Simply punch a small hole in the card, attach one end of a piece of fishing line to the card, and the other to a tree or fence post. Then attach the key chain itself across your property, using zip ties, string, duct tape, or whatever’s handy.

Voila! Instant tripwire alarm.