Smart locks on gates, garages and outbuildings

A lock you control from an app talks to it over Bluetooth, wifi or a hub. Bluetooth reaches a few metres, so a gate at the end of a garden is often out of range of anything in the house.

Two ways round it: a gateway placed nearer the gate, or a lock whose keypad works on its own with no connection at all. Check how a lock connects before buying it for anywhere the house wifi does not reach.

An outdoor keypad sits in the rain all year. Look for a lock made for outside use with a stated water and dust rating — usually given as an IP rating — rather than an indoor lock fitted to an outside door.

Batteries run down faster in a cold winter, too. A lock that warns you early matters more on a gate than on a door you walk past every day.

A metal gate usually needs a lock body made for gates, fixed to the surface or into the frame, not the handle set a house door takes. Most front-door smart locks simply have nothing on a gate to fix to.

An up-and-over garage door has no multipoint mechanism for a smart lock to work, so the usual answer is a smart lock on the side door into the garage, with the main door left as it is.

For a shed, a smart padlock is often the sensible choice, and it needs no fitting at all.

If the gate is powered, the keypad or app belongs to the gate system: it tells the motor to open. That is a gate engineer's job, and a door lock is the wrong tool for it.