The Truth About Electronic Locks On Homes

Cody joins the podcast squad this week. The guys discuss the pros and cons of electronic locks in residential situations, and give you a piece of advice to avoid having one destroyed in the event of a lockout.

Website: https://jjlocks.com/

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Transcript

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Not sure how many listeners we have on the east and west coast, which actually we just went over our listeners viewership. Shout out to those in China. Yes, thank you guys. When we first started doing this, this 400 was just a really like 400 people want to listen, but it keeps growing every week, so that's, thank god. Brandon's mom. Thank you mom. Just hit, keep hitting that replay button. Welcome to Access. Granted A Peek inside the real life stories of Physical Security Professionals. Now here are your hosts, Justin, John, Ryan, Cody, and Brandon. Alright, so Cody's been with us three years. You want to give us a little background on who you are, what hole you crawled out of, and how things are going for you. Things are going great. Thank you for asking. Let's see. I've known these guys for a while, since. First grade. First grade, and came upon a time I was looking for employment and I bring a wide set of skills one could say. I'd say personalities. Sure. Yes. Wide range of personalities. All of them. Yes, all of my personalities have a skill set and brought those to you guys begging. We much appreciated it. It has worked out pretty well in our favor. Thank you. I hope that. The question is now after three years, do you consider yourself off duties as a locksmith? It's kind of one of those things that encroach on your personal life and when people ask what you do, you're not like a woodworker. Oh, I'm a locksmith, this is what I do. I'm a locksmith. Does. That encroach? Yes, encroaching plenty. I still have a friend waiting for me to come down to Muscatine and put his deadbolts on from three years ago. So. Yeah, I point out locks to my wife as we're walking by them saying, I did that. Yeah, there's a form of SM that appears in all locksmiths over the time where you touch doors or look at locks or look at security cameras like, oh, look at that. Wow, that's installed wrong. Who did that? Why would they do that? Why would they, that door doesn't even shut. I actually thought about you last night at sitting in one of the drive-through restaurants that may or may not serve custard ice cream of sorts working on their back door. That one was a lovely warm, hot day in the sun. Looked at that the other day and was like, man, I hope they don't call me again. Well, I saw the guy in Howie opened it and closed it and that's what made me think about you and Cody's going to have to come back here and fix that. So can I have some custom. What's the topic here today. Brady? Today we're going to talk about electronic locks for your house, your residential type push button style locks. Cody, you've done more residential things here with us lately. What do you like about 'em? Well, there is such a wide range of push button locks available and people are definitely excited about them more and more these days as the industry changes. So it is nice that people do get to kind of pick and choose what they want, what works best. Which ones are you installing nowadays? Mostly thele ones, Schlag, residential push buttons. We've seen a lot of those. I've seen a few, very few from online retailers. I don't know if we're naming them. You can if you. Don't need to and you can say what you feel like. They can get mad at me all they want, but it's an honest installer's product. Review. I've seen some unique shapes and sizes that when you, for instance, put it on the door, it's too thick to sit in between the door and the screen door, whereas a normal knob would be fine for that. So there are some things you got to take into consideration before you choose one for your lock. Yeah, I mean I think as we go we can say that I think most of us have had either experience of installing them or have them on our houses personally. I've had an electronic deadbolt on my house for almost 10 years now and it comes in handy and I think what we should really do and focus on today is giving our honest recommendation don't like and what the customer should be looking for when they buy 'em. Yeah, and when we talk about that, when they start looking for 'em, what we're looking at is, is it going to be wireless, is it going to be Bluetooth, is it going to be Z-Wave? What technology are we going to use to be able to connect to that device with our mobile app, mobile phone I should say, or within our home apps like Apple's home or Samsung's hub or something of that sort. Well speaking of that John, what do you have on your house and what is your code? Okay, so what I have on my house is I actually have the SLE on my house. I have the B 4 92 I believe it is, and it is a Z-Wave device. So it actually talks to my smart hub that I have in the house, which allows me to then lock and unlock the door remotely from my mobile phone. It allows me to tie it directly into the security system that I have so that I get notification of the door being locked or unlocked from the app. I can lock and unlock the door from the app, from the security app and I can change codes or issue temporary codes from that app. Now one thing to ask there, what would the cost be for the customer for something like that? Because a big thing, people come in and they say, I saw this lock on debt online. I want you to install it and then you get there something that we're going to sell for them to do it online if they haven't purchased it themselves, what's the cost going to be for that? Well, when we look at that, the cost online varies anywhere from about two and a half to$500 on average. We're going to charge around 400 to $500 to install it, set it up and get it operational for'em. There's no monthly cost in that. If you tie it to your security system, there could be a monthly. Just two smaller kind of things to think about when you're getting one. Not sure how many listeners we have on the east and west coast, which actually we just went over our listeners viewership. Shout out to those in China. Yes, thank you guys. When we first started doing this, this 400 was just a really 400 people want to listen to this, but it keeps growing every week. So that's, thank god Brandon's mom. Thank you mom. Just keep hitting that replay button. But as far as. She'll love you. It we're working on it, but the pros and cons, basically if you're in the Midwest, you have four seasons. So like Cody was saying earlier, find a deadbolt nut not only fits behind your screen door, but a have a screen door, although that's going to keep all the snow and rain and everything out of it. And also electronics outside, they're rated for so much, but when we have a Minnesota Wisconsin type winner down here. If it's negative 30 or below, those locks aren't going to function the way you want 'em to. So. Also try to get. One with an override key that way. And the. Winter, we've said it before, we'll say it again on this podcast. If you're putting electronic locks on your house, always have an override key. Any lock that sells it specifically it was, it's Yale Home Residential. They sell locks that a DT will put in for you and they give you a great monthly cost, but if they put them on all the doors, I'm going to have to destroy one to get you back in. Me personally, like I said, I've had a push button lock on my front and garage door for almost 10 years now. And what is your code? It is none of your damn business. It's weird. It's an alphanumeric code. Oh good. Yeah, that's a long one. Yeah, it is. It don't know how many digits that is. Kids can't handle it, but no, I have an mtech deadbolt. Mtech is a higher line finished product for door handles and cabinet locks and mine is not a connected deadbolt, it is just a electronic deadbolt. I put a code in, I can put up to 16 of them in. And then the nice thing about mine that I like as an installer is that I throw the bolt. That's normally the type we recommend on the styles where you throw the bolt so you can control that and the battery life lasts longer where the one that John was talking about earlier, his actually throws the bolt for him. Now when you have an electronic deadbolt that throws the bolt for you, you run into some issues. The door has to be square, has to be plumb, has to be true, and there can't be any pressure on that deadbolt otherwise you might run into short battery lives. Failures in the opening side. So if you've got a really bad door, you might want to look into electronic deadbolt that you can throw yourself. Yeah. One of the issues we found when it was that the door, when the deadbolt actually goes into the frame, if it's not perfectly free of any touching the bolt, let's put it that way, then what you do is you get what we call a jam notification, meaning the deadbolt didn't throw all the way. And that's really inconvenient if you're about five, 10 minutes away and then you finally look at your phone and you realize the door didn't lock. The other ones that Ryan has, Ryan had on his last house some wifi enabled deadbolts from a company called Secu Ram. So my deadbolts were actually really nice. They had a fingerprint reader and everything on 'em, which isn't reliable, but it's still really nice when it does work. The good thing about it was an all included app and everything it inside of the lock. You didn't have to connect it to an alarm system or anything like that to be able to lock it, unlock it, see if the door shut. All of that comes in just the lockbox where you can connect it to your internet and it worked out really well. And that one. Allowed you to do a lot of the same features where you could change your code, you could remotely unlock and everything. From the app, correct? Yes. I could assign new codes to somebody that's coming for for an hour, anything like that. So the only thing about that one was that the bolt throws automatically. John's, I used to prefer the ones Justin was talking about, but you have to throw the bolt yourself, but nowadays they've come a long way for sure. Yeah, and it's on my house. I know dang well the doors plum and lining up. Correctly, which is very rare for a locksmith. Normally we know exactly how hard to push it or pull it to get it to work and everyone that comes like Why do you tolerate that? You wouldn't tolerate that anywhere else is because I'm good at this. It's not that big of a deal for me. Yeah, you talk about that. I do the electronics and so forth and I've been installing electronic alarms and cameras and everything else and I just recently got all that put on the house. Yeah. Oh no. Dad's right. It is something newer for him and I like the features he's had. He's had about just under a year now and it is working really well as a recommendation. I really do think that the Schlag is going to be one of your better manufacturers and then we can go from there. M tech's great, but they don't have any wifi connectivity right now. They're supposed to be coming out with some Bluetooth stuff. Cody, do you have any fancy pants locks on your house? No, Brandon, I've got the pro grade brand. It's. A great brand. Set of locks that is our standard. So I kind of take that as a way of telling our customers that I trust it on my house, a salesman and they'd be good to go from there. Don't push the door too hard. And then you show them how to pick into it easily. He does that just because the window's unlocked and on my house I have, it's not an invitation, but it's kind of a I wish you would type of deal. We don't lock 'em at night. If you can get down the hallway between the array of guns, bows, throwing knives and katanas, I guess you win. So. Yeah, Brandon never picked up the locksmiths. He's got that other type of, I've got all kinds of weird knives on me at all times. No, I think safety first always. We were discussing it this morning, Brandon, I don't even think you have a key to the front door of your house. Oh dude, I did change it oh, years ago, but I don't ever use it. It's been locked for. Years. We were moving that refrigerator in and I was like, do you even have a key to this? He's like, somewhere. I was like, I think I know a guy that could get you one. Yeah. Then I did remember it's like, no, I did change this to match it never did before. So I did change it and then I never used it, so it's kind of pointless. Anyway. If someone's listening and they're looking to be in the market for electronic locks on their house, two things I want to say. Deadbolt's the best way to go. Always want deadbolt's going to be the most security on your house. You're going to get and you're going to go for an electronic deadbolt. The electronic levers that are out there fine for a garage. If you don't keep much in there, I don't recommend it as the main security on your house. If you don't have a deadbolt, we can easily drill and Brandon, Ryan, John and I have installed thousands of deadbolts between us and we can, we're pretty damn good at it. And then like I said, we would push forward probably something like the Schlag brand. Any of theirs are fairly good. They've come a long way with the gearing and thrown in the bolt themselves on the higher end or even the ones that you throw the bolt yourself. And then we can facilitate a lot of different types we'll even install them for you if you've purchased them. So if you found one online that you think is going to be the cat's meow, we'll install it for you. But guess what? You're not going to buy it from us and there's going to be no warranty on the product itself. And do your research just in case if you're buying from not a name brand or not one of the big stores. Right? I mean if you just go out to one of the box stores right now, you'll probably find 10 or 15 different electronic locks. And there's a few brand names, sle, quickset, Yale, but then you also have a large array of electronic locks made in China, made in Taiwan, made in Vietnam that just don't have the quality per se of some of the larger brand names do. And as we move forward too, there's some newer guys on the market. There's the level lock, the August lock, those will retrofit your existing deadbolt. I personally have only run into them a couple of times and installed them. They're not bad. The apps are great, but they're definitely not lock manufacturers. And that's what we're looking for when we're putting security on someone's house. We want somebody who's been in the game for a little bit. And what you find with these website web available electronic deadbolts is you got a lot of people who have app developers or they're a software developer and they're getting into the lock game because it's a 2 billion or 4 billion industry and they're trying to get that portion of that money. And I think they have a long way to go when it comes to actually being tough and secure. But there's nothing wrong with them. If you want to choose to do that, I don't personally have them available. I will install them for you. So Justin, tell me about that time with that guy with that push button. That with, so we had a guy that had a push button lock that he put on his shed. And this was what most people would refer to as what the females would call a she shed. This was this guy's man shed, he had the smallest house about the size of this room, but the shed was twice the size and he lived most of his life out of a sprinter van. And he's like, Hey, it's a big emergency. My dog's locked in my shed. I need you to come out the key override that has this thing isn't working and I need you to come in and get my dog out. And so I go up there and it's this really kind of chintzy, and it's probably a bad word to use, but a push button lock. And the key override was in the bottom of the lock and it was really inconvenient. It was colder and shit. And I had to drill the cylinder out because the key wasn't doing anything. It turned, it just didn't do anything. And then pull the manipulator, manipulate the lever down to open the door. And I got in there and this guy was all worried about his dog because he had pounds of marijuana inside the shed and he was afraid the dog was going to eat it. And it was like he had a humidor and tobacco leaves hanging. He rolled his own cigars there, but he infused the cigars with marijuana. And when I got into it, what he was afraid of, his little chihuahua was going to eat this marijuana and get high as die. Oh, sorry, I shouldn't have said the F word, but was it the Taco Bell dog? It was basically the Taco Bell dog, but it was a hairy version of that chihuahua. But this guy looked like a bear himself. He was a big guy. And he gets in there and he goes, what do you do with all this? Oh, I'm an over the road trucker and I buy this stuff in Mexico and I bring it back. And he had it just like in the movies wrapped up in Saran wrap and it was cut open and he was rolling his cigars and he went back into the house and used the bathroom and he locked his dog and the marijuana in his shed. And this is why, guys, you always got to remember, don't leave your drugs out and don't leave your drugs out. And also it was in Illinois, it was legal. Okay. He also told me he had glaucoma, which I don't know if I believe that. I know if it was quite a dog or him. I think both of them at this. Point, I'm not sure Illinois packages it like that. But. Yeah, again, when you're buying your, he didn't follow the rule, get a key override, but he didn't follow the rule of buying someone who was a lock manufacturer before he installed it. Well, with that guys, like I said, if you have any questions that you want to ask us about residential deadbolts or any other topics, give us a call at (563) 322-0123 or stop down at the shop at 1304 West fourth Street in Davenport, Iowa. And we'll be back in a couple of weeks to talk with John and Justin about the Paxton 10 access control system. Thanks for listening to Access Granted. A podcast by j and j, access and Security in association with tag. For more information about j and j Access and security, visit jj locks.com tag.