Month: January 2015

Is your window open?

I go out on all kinds of service calls. What I enjoy most is residential lockouts. They often require a bit of skill and problem-solving, people are happy to see me when I show up, and I feel a certain sense of accomplishment when I’m finished.

I don’t think I’m giving away a big trade secret when I say that about half the time I go to perform a lockout in a single-family dwelling—a house, that is—I’m able to find an open window. Usually I ask the resident if any windows are unlocked. Invariably the answer is a confident “no”. I always check anyway. In the end, the client either looks chagrined over being proven wrong, or smug in his vindication. I used to ask over the phone before going out on the lockout call whether there were any open windows. I learned my lesson about doing that the time I arrived to discover the client had decided to give the windows one last check after telling me that none were open. That was a wasted trip on a Sunday afternoon.

Sometimes I worry that getting in through a window is like cheating. People call a locksmith and they want to see a show. Opening a window and climbing through it like a burglar isn’t that. On the other hand, most people also just want to get into their homes as quickly as possible, and checking for open windows facilitates that. The lock picks stay in my pocket until all easier methods have failed.

The other night I went on a very late call and started looking around the house for unlocked windows. I found one in back that looked to be a good candidate and the client told me she’d already checked it. That didn’t stop me from pushing at it and seeing it slide open. I understand how she could have made that mistake. It’s all about expectations. A window can be a little bit difficult to open from the outside. If you don’t expect it to be open, you might interpret the little bit of resistance as confirmation that it’s not. Because my expectation when I show up to a job is that there is an easy way in, I don’t give up when a window doesn’t immediately give.

So if you get back from a vacation on which you’ve lost your keys, check your windows before calling for a locksmith. Also, before you leave for that vacation, check to make sure all your windows are secured. Locksmiths aren’t the only ones who know to check for open windows.

Newfangled Digital Locks

I’ve been getting a lot of questions about installing digital keypad locks on people’s front doors. Schlage and Kwikset are offering a number of increasingly affordable options for keypad-operated levers and deadbolts. I have mixed thoughts about them.

On the one hand, they’re awesome! They light up, they chirp, and they add digitization into yet another aspect of our lives. Some of them link into smart home systems and can be remotely programmed to provide and deny access to incidental visitors. Instead of giving a cleaner or short-term house guest a key that can be secretly duplicated, you can give out an entry code and delete it whenever you want. And they allow you to go without a key. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal to have a ring of keys in your pocket, but there will likely come a day when people will think it strange and backwards that we all carried these jangly bunches of metal around with us at all times. If the world is going to start moving toward fancy computer locks, Redmond, WA is an appropriate place for that trend to take off.

From a security standpoint, many of these locks are pretty solid. Most of the Schlage models meet ANSI Grade 1 standards. I personally don’t know an easy way to bypass the keypad yet; if I want to get through one of these I have to pick the lock cylinder. But it’s not hard to imagine that someone will figure out a way to do it, and then it will be necessary to rethink the way these locks are designed. That’s true of mechanical locks as well.

I do have some reservations about these new locks. Most of them are battery-operated, and batteries fail. They usually give you a warning that the battery is dying. But changing the batteries on a deadbolt is the kind of thing that many of us tend to put off until it’s too late. If the lock also works with a key (that you happen to have access to when you really need it), then you’re fine. Otherwise you may be locked out when the batteries finally give out. I recommend against getting a lock that takes no key at all.

Installation is supposed to be pretty easy, as you can supposedly replace your old lock with the new one without boring any new holes. The thing is that it’s extremely common for a deadbolt’s throw to be poorly aligned with its strike, which means that you have to push or pull the door a little to get it into position before you can operate the lock. That’s easy enough for you to do, but try getting your digital lock’s four AA-batteries to push the door into place so it can engage or disengage the throw. It’s impossible. These locks don’t leave any room for error in installation. And with the way our doors swell during these wet Seattle winters, a lock that’s installed perfectly in the summer might start to malfunction a few months later. Though this is fixed easily enough, the point is that it’s not always as plug-and-play as it suggests on the box. But when was it ever?

My biggest qualm with these locks is that they introduce a new expense into our lives. You can get a good lock for $30, which, if installed correctly, will last for thirty years. I don’t have any evidence to support this yet, but I just can’t help doubting the longevity of a piece of electronics that’s mounted to the outside of a door in a famously wet climate. I predict that these locks will start to go bad after 7 to 10 years. So instead of the deadbolt costing $1 per annum, you might be dividing the cost of a $120- or $180-deadbolt over a much shorter stretch, and finding that your deadbolt expense is now ten or twenty times what it used to be. Also, you might end up spending more of your life servicing, replacing, and thinking about home security hardware than you ever needed to before.

Take these complaints with a grain of salt, as they’re coming from a guy who’s spendthrift, averse to change, and late to adopt new technologies. If you want to buy one of these locks, go with Schlage instead of Kwikset, and avoid the knockoff brands. Try installing it yourself. If you run into trouble, give me a call. I promise not to grumble.