How Anti-Climbing Paint Protects Your Home

Anti-climbing paint, also known as anti-vandal paint and security paint, is truly a modern marvel. This paint is slick and slippery to the touch, which makes it very difficult for unwelcome visitors to gain purchase and climb up walls or fencing. Use it around the potentially vulnerable areas of your home to make your property much more thief-proof.

How It Works

Criminals devote much of their energy and creativity to finding ways into places where they aren't welcome, and they'll use anything they can to achieve this goal. This can include climbing up drain pipes, fencing, and any other area of your home that may be breachable. Anti-climbing paint is a simple, elegant way to secure these vulnerable areas.

It's made with a petroleum gel base that prevents the paint from setting completely, which results in a slick and slippery surface. You can buy many colors of paint like this in totally safe, non-toxic varieties. Anti-climbing paint is applied like any ordinary paint, so you don't need special equipment to use it around your home.

Where to Use Anti-Climbing Paint

Paint that can protect your home sounds pretty great, right? Still, you don't necessarily want to use anti-climbing paint everywhere. This type of paint is not recommended by manufacturers for use on walls or fences that receive frequent, regular contact. It's also not recommended for surfaces within seven feet of ground level.

There are many places you can (and should) use anti-climbing paint to keep criminals at bay. Use this type of paint on all your drain pipes, window ledges, and gutters. All of these can provide points of entry into your home for anyone with agility. Strong climbers may even scale your walls, so be sure to use anti-climbing paint on any walls or fences around your property. Remember, burglars are highly motivated. In many cases, stealing may be their only career. They will take risks. So if you see potential, they will see it, too.

There is yet one more benefit to using anti-climbing paint: it leaves stains. Criminals who attempt to climb fencing or walls of your home will walk away with paint on their hands, feet, and clothing. Because this paint never fully dries, it leaves a residue on anything that comes into contact with it. Anyone who attempts to breach your property and comes into contact with the paint will literally be marked, which can make it much easier for police officers to find and arrest them.

This also means you’ll want to use caution when it comes to applying this paint to your property. Don’t paint any spots people or pets may rub up against, because they, too, will get stained. Anti-climbing paint is very difficult to remove from skin, hair, and clothing. This is why manufacturers recommended painting areas seven feet above the ground and higher—areas where only a potential criminal would be making contact with your home.

Weird Laws

As strange as it may sound, you have a legal responsibility to safeguard every person who is on your property. And in some places, that extends even to people who are on your property illegally. This means if a criminal attempts to climb up a wall of your home and ends up slipping and injuring themselves, in some places you may actually be legally liable for their injuries. Just imagine being sued by a would-be burglar who broke an arm while trying to break and enter into your home!

However, you can avoid this nightmare scenario. Put up a sign anywhere on your property that says you have anti-climbing, or anti-vandal, paint. This relieves you of any legal responsibility toward those who may get injured while attempting to carry out some criminal misdeed. This can also protect you against civil lawsuits. In England, one couple sued a man who had covered his fence with anti-climbing paint, because their children’s clothing got ruined when the kids attempted to breach his property to commit acts of vandalism.

Protecting Your Home

It’s a good idea to have a home security system, motion-detecting lights, and a plan in place to alert the authorities if you ever find yourself in danger. But you can never have too much protection for your property. Something as simple as a coat of paint can prevent criminal types from breaching your property and gaining access to your home. This is a very affordable and easy way to add another layer of protection and keep your home (and everything inside of it) that much safer.

You shouldn’t rely on anti-climbing paint alone to keep your home safe, but you can use it as part of your overall protection plan to make it much more difficult for vandals, burglars, and other dangerous people to enter your home uninvited. If all it takes is a little paint to make your property safer, why not?