What Angel soft said. The only police out here are the highway department, and they wouldn’t be able to see the house without driving down our 1/4 mile gravel driveway. When you live out here, you are responsible for your own home security, which works great when you’re home 
This actually has been helpful (especially the info about it being hard to reduce deductibles.) I think we’re just going to move our most expensive tools to friend’s houses, and hope for the best .
This seems pretty basic to me.
If his deductible is currently $5000 and he lowers it to $1000, he’s lowered his exposure to risk by $4000.
If he is correct that the risk of loss is higher while he’s away, this might be a good decision.
Insurance companies certainly have an incentive to not let you make changes like this without cost. Exactly what their models are and how they interact with the regulation in your state makes it hard to know how attempting to do this would end up.
Presumably lowering the deductible will raise the premiums, though.
But only by, maybe a hundred dollars or so.
Sure. But it still limits risk.
I mean, having insurance at all raises your premiums (over the $0 that no insurance costs). But would anyone say “I don’t see how having insurance limits your risk.” because you have to pay premiums for it?
The whole point of insurance is to pay a known fixed cost to limit downside risk. Lowering your deductible is paying a higher known fixed cost to further limit downside risk: essentially just buying more insurance.