Smart locks for your own front door

Almost nobody rings up wanting a smart lock. They ring up because of a specific daily annoyance, and a smart lock is what fixes it:

• Children home before you are, and you have run out of spare keys you are willing to hand out.
• A cleaner, a dog walker or a relative who needs to get in on certain days and not others.
• Being locked out once, and never wanting it again.
• A parcel, a boiler engineer, a delivery — someone who needs to be let in while you are at work.
• Keys that have been copied over the years by people you have lost track of.

For a home, usually Yale or Nuki. Yale because you already know the name and have probably owned one; Nuki because it mounts over the cylinder you already have, so the street side of your door barely changes.

We also fit August, Igloohome and TTLock. TTLock is what we lead with for landlords and holiday lets, where handing out and expiring dozens of codes matters more than the badge on the front. On a family front door that is usually the wrong trade-off, and we will say so.

Bought one already? We will fit it, and tell you before we start if it is wrong for the door.

Day to day you stop carrying a key. You put a finger on the reader or tap in four digits and the door opens. That is the whole of it, and it is the part people underestimate until about a fortnight in.

The rest sits behind an app for when you need it: give the cleaner a code that only works Tuesday mornings, let a relative in from your desk, see that the kids got home. You can ignore all of that and it still works as a lock.

Batteries last roughly six months to a year and warn you well before they go. Every lock we fit keeps a way in that does not need power — usually a mechanical key you keep in the car or with a neighbour and never otherwise think about.

A smart lock is not right for every home. If your door is dropped, warped, or the multipoint mechanism is already on its way out, fitting a lock to it makes a bad door worse and we will tell you so at the survey rather than take the work.

Some doors need the mechanism replaced first. Sometimes that is worth doing and sometimes it is not, and either way you will hear it before you have paid anything.