A lot of people are asking me about how they can get a lock they can remotely change the combination to.  A lot of them want to be running AirBNB or rentals.  I have answers for you!

My favorite lock for an AirBNB situation is the Schlage be469nx.  Schlage wants you to pay them $9 for their monthly service through Nexia but that isn’t necessary.  Zwave is an open protocol and you can connect a Schlage BE469nx to your router through SmartThings, Vera, Wink, and Lowe’s Iris to name a few.  If you are tech-oriented or have someone in family who is, you could have a networked deadbolt set up for extremely low cost. 

Once your deadbolt is connected through wifi, as long as the wifi router is powered you can change login combinations remotely.  That means you can lock people out, add new combinations, etc.  If you install a Dropcam in conjunction with a lock that is controllable with wifi you can remotely let people in safely.  This is a huge savings over what similar hardware that did the same thing would have cost just a few years ago.  One can literally monitor who is coming and going for less than 10% of the cost of a few years ago.  The Amazon cost for one of these locks is now less than $200.  A Dropcam is only $200.  If you set it all up using zwave and a free monitoring program you can remotely monitor a property for $400 cash.  That is extraordinary.

If you want to change credentials remotely on the cheap, there is no better solution than the Schlage BE469nx.  Of course there are better locks available for commercial solutions, namely from Alarm Lock, but if only a few people are accessing your property per day then the Schlage offering is fine.

I install these locks for less than $100 (plus cost of lock) in the North Seattle area.  You can have your property up and running in less than a day if you call me.  I have installed numerous be469nx locks as well as other locks that are wireless flawlessly.  Important steps in the process are making sure that the bolt goes into the door frame/strike smoothly.  If you hire a cowboy to do it and the bolt doesn’t go in smoothly your battery will die prematurely or even worse your lock’s servo may burn out and then you have to RMA your lock.  What are you going to put on your door while the lock is being RMA’d?

I have been getting a few calls recently from homeowner’s associations and commercial property owners who have experienced break-ins after criminals forced a door open.  They did so in two cases by merely pushing a commercial lever down really hard.  You would think that door hardware manufacturers would design their levers to fail secure, that is to design their locks to break with the door still locked.  That is frequently not the case.

Most commercial levers have through bolts that go through the door above and below the lock and their purpose is to keep the lock from rotating.  If the lock rotates it may retract the latch and the door will open.  Schlage’s AL series of levers are very popular hardware for commercial property owners but these levers in particular seem to be pretty susceptible to forced entry, especially the fixed levers.

Fixed levers are rigid so a hooligan seeking entry to your building merely needs to stand on or hammer that lever and in at least a few recent cases I am aware of that has gained them entry.  There are numerous things to be done to prevent this.

You can get a clutched lever.  These are levers that are not rigid, so people have a much harder time standing on them or forcing them.  They are confusing to people who haven’t encountered them before though.  Lots of people expect a locked door to have a rigid lever and if the lever is not rigid they expect that door to be unlocked.

Second option is to get a lever designed to fail secure.  Schlage released their Vandlgard locks which promise to not allow entry to those who force the lever over.  They have an MSRP of $500 though. I am a big fan of the Marks 195 Survivor Series. They have a hefty price tag but they are very resilient to forced entry and stand up well to abuse. They are also made in America.

Another good option that is less expensive is to cover the lever with a lever guard.  This makes the lock very difficult to manipulate with brute force, though it can still be drilled.  The lever guard is installed over the lever and secured with three bolts.  One concern I have with this solution is that a criminal can tie a chain through the lever guard pull handle and pull the door off with a truck or winch.

The best solution to this problem is to remove the lever and install a rim cylinder and panic device.  There is nothing on the outside of the door that a criminal can try to force.  There is nothing to grab onto except for a minimal pull handle.  The criminal is forced to reckon with the lock itself.  If that lock is a UL437-rated lock with steel pins to prevent drilling then the criminal has a very difficult job ahead of him or herself.

Today a customer asked me to put a lock cylinder in a sliding glass door so I got out a Slide-Co SC1 cylinder I had bought for the purpose.   Had to rekey the cylinder so I started unscrewing the cap and discovered that the cylinder turned without even having a key in it.  When I took the cylinder apart I discovered that all of the top pins are actually bottom pins.

Lazy locksmiths use bottom pins as top pins because it makes nearly every key work when put into the cylinder.  If you use one bottom pin as a top pin, nearly half of the possible bottom pins will still work for that chamber.  If you aren’t able to picture that, know this: the security of the cylinder is compromised if somebody does this in a few chambers.  If they do it in all of the chambers, they may as well not put any pins in the cylinder at all.  The cylinder I had would literally open if I used my fingernail.

The other issue with this cylinder: the plug came filed down from the factory.  Lazy and inept locksmiths sometimes decide to file the plug in a cylinder down because they are unable to find the proper pins to match the depths in a key, or they want to make multiple keys of different depths work.  This makes the cylinder inherently insecure.  There are certain situations where I can see somebody filing the plug down to make a bunch of people’s keys work but you shouldn’t get a cylinder plug filed down from the factory.  There is really no excuse.

What can you do about this?  If you put one of these in your door, make sure that a screwdriver doesn’t turn your sliding door’s lock, and try multiple keys not meant to open that lock to make sure that none of them work.  If the lock fails either of these tests, consider bringing the cylinder to a locksmith to fix the issues I have described.  The top pins need to be replaced for the cylinder to do its job properly.

A better solution would be to buy a better cylinder.  Unfortunately, most patio door and sliding door locks are designed to only work with these terrible after market cylinders.  I am still looking for a proper solution to this problem.

Maple Leaf Locksmith LLC now has the capacity to clone high security transponder-enabled car keys that are milled.  If your key looks like one below, I can probably clone it.  I am working on a javascript selector so that the end user can find out if I can clone their key before they call.

Interesting developments in the game of leapfrog between security researchers and criminals.  Looks like the criminals figured something out before the white-hats this time.  The prevailing theory on the matter is that thieves have figured out how to open cars that use fobs (plastic bits that replace the need for a key; the driver can operate the car simply by having a fob in their pocket) by using a signal amplifier.  The signal amplifier in effect increases the range so that the car is fooled into thinking the fob is in close proximity.  That is to say, thieves may have figured out that they can buy a $20 amplifier that will amplify the signal of your fob.  The amplification of the fob’s signal means that the challenge/response communication between the fob and the vehicle can happen from 500 feet away instead of twenty feet, for example.

In the linked articles researchers suggest that keeping your fob wrapped in tinfoil will block the signal from being amplified.  They also suggest keeping your fob in a freezer.  They suggest that the freezer acts as a Faraday cage.  I suspect that it does not act as a Faraday cage but rather has lots of insulation that prevents the signal from getting out.  I don’t think that there is a lot of electricity going through my freezer’s door.  If it works though, it works.