What a smart lock installation actually involves

People expect the drilling. What surprises them is how much of the visit happens before anything comes off the door, and how much happens after it is already working.

Open the door and look at its edge. That tells us whether it is a multipoint mechanism or a single latch, and it decides everything after it — which products can go on, whether the existing gear stays, and how long the job takes.

Then the cylinder comes out and gets measured properly, from the fixing screw to each face separately. Cylinders are usually offset, and a replacement that sticks out past the handle is a worse door than the one we started with.

We also check the door shuts without being lifted or leaned on. A door that has dropped will bind on the keeps, and a motorised lock that has to fight the frame will eat batteries and eventually fail. That gets sorted first or the lock goes on a door that will disappoint you.

On a euro cylinder swap it is genuinely twenty minutes. A handle set or a full mechanism change is longer, and a door with a previous cut-out made for different hardware is longer again, because the timber or the reinforcement has already been taken out once.

Where there is glazing near the lock body we work around it rather than through it. Cracking a double-glazed unit costs more than the lock and the labour together.

Setup and handover. The account goes in your name, not ours — the most common mess we are called out to fix is a lock configured under an installer's account, leaving the owner unable to add a code without ringing somebody.

Then codes, fingerprints or cards get added with you doing it rather than watching, because the point is that you can do it again in six months. If there is a gateway it gets sited where it actually reaches the lock, which is rarely where the router is.

And the mechanical key gets handed over with the advice to keep it somewhere that is not inside the house.