Pricing
Sixteen jobs, one list, and which door you mean.
Sixteen jobs, fourteen of them with a range and two quoted once the openings have been counted on site. What moves a figure inside its range here is which door you mean and what the salt has done to it: a cylinder still turning cleanly takes the low end, a plug pitted by years of fog takes the high one. Say which door and how the key feels, and the range closes to a single number on the call. A range here is the whole spread for that work anywhere in the city, and the table further down shows the only thing the clock adds to it: $50 after 8pm and $90 after midnight.
Emergency Locksmith
OverviewResidential Locksmith
OverviewCommercial Locksmith
OverviewAutomotive Locksmith
OverviewThree tiers, and what each one adds
All the clock is allowed to do, on six common jobs
Every figure below is the low end of that job's published range with the hour already inside it, said the way you would hear it on the phone. Between 8pm and midnight a job carries $55, and between midnight and 7am it carries $95. Nothing else on the clock changes a number, and neither a weekend nor a holiday does.
| Job | 7am–8pm | 8pm–12am | 12am–7am |
|---|---|---|---|
| House lockout | $135 | $190 | $230 |
| Car lockout | $109 | $164 | $204 |
| Business lockout | $145 | $200 | $240 |
| Lock replacement | $129 | $184 | $224 |
| Car key replacement | $159 | $214 | $254 |
| Key fob programming | $95 | $150 | $190 |
The $89 visit is inside every figure in this table rather than underneath it. These are low ends, and what lifts a job off them is the door. A leaf that has dropped on its hinges, a bore cut narrower than the modern standard, a strike that has to be moved and its mortise recut: any of those lands the figure higher in the published range, and it is said on the call rather than found on the receipt.
Why a range
A range is wide because two doors are not one job
The same job at the garage-level door and at the front door up the steps lands at opposite ends of one range, and ten winters of fog decide a good part of the rest. Four things settle it, in the order they come up on the call.
Which door, first of all
The door at the pavement and the door at the top of the outside steps are two different jobs with one name. The lower one takes every arrival, so its cylinder is worn and its strike has usually moved; the upper one is often untouched since the house was built. The clock is allowed one thing only: $50 between 8pm and midnight, $90 between midnight and 7am, folded into the figure before you agree to anything.
What the fog has done to it
A cylinder a mile from open water is not the same cylinder it was ten winters ago. Chloride reaches the springs first, then the pins, then the plug, and a key that has to be wiggled is already telling you which stage it is at. Say how the key feels and most of the spread is gone before anybody drives out.
What is already on the door
One builder ordered the hardware for a whole tract at once, so the knob set on a Westlake house is the same knob set three streets over, in the same place at the same height. That makes the work predictable, and it is why a job here is quoted from a description rather than discovered on arrival.
Whether the lock can be kept
Ground that runs from sea level to seven hundred and eighty feet moves, and a strike that has shifted a quarter inch reads exactly like a failed lock from the outside. Bringing it back into line sits inside the visit, not on the bill as parts. Where a cylinder is genuinely finished it is replaced at $125 to $329, and you hear which of the two yours is.
FAQ
What people ask once they hear a figure
Why does the lower door wear out when the front door still feels new?+
Because one of them is working and the other one is not. A lock is rated in cycles and the rating quietly assumes a front door with a few openings a day. On the plan these streets were built to, the car goes into the garage, the household walks up into the house from inside it, groceries and laundry and school bags all come through the same leaf, and it is the last thing locked at night. The door at the top of the steps might see a dozen openings a month. So a sixty-year-old cylinder at the top can be in fine order while its twin at the bottom is worn through, and replacing the front one first is spending money in the wrong place.
My key has gone stiff and needs a wiggle. Is that the lock or the weather?+
Around here it is usually the weather, and the test takes ten seconds. Open the door, then turn the key with the door standing open. If it is still stiff, the trouble is inside the cylinder. Chloride comes in off the water and settles in the keyway, and it works on the pins, the springs and the walls of the plug, where the whole working clearance is a fraction of a millimeter. Stiffness is the first stage, not the last. If instead the key turns freely with the door open and only fights when the door is shut, the lock is fine and the bolt has stopped lining up with the strike, which on ground this steep is common. A repin is $29 to $46 per cylinder, a replacement $125 to $329, and moving a strike back into line is part of the visit.
Is a Sunday or a holiday priced differently, or only the hour on the clock?+
Saturdays, Sundays and public holidays all run at ordinary daytime figures. Only the clock changes anything: arrival between 8pm and midnight adds $50, and between midnight and 7am adds $90. Both are counted in before you say yes rather than appearing on the card afterward. A house lockout at $145 in the afternoon is quoted as $195 at ten at night and $235 at three in the morning, and every one of those figures is still inside the published $129 to $239.
We are turning the garage into a separate unit. How should the keys be arranged?+
Decide it once, on paper, before the first tenant moves in. The city permits the conversion and does not require the parking to be replaced, so what used to be your own back way into the house becomes somebody else's front door with its own turnover. In practice that means a proper deadbolt on the unit door that your household key does not open, a separate cylinder on the door from the garage up into the hallway so the two homes are genuinely separate, and one key held by the owner that opens whichever of those you want it to. Have the chart written on the receipt. Then a change of tenant is one cylinder repinned at $29 to $46 instead of a whole afternoon of guessing which key is which.
We just bought here. What is worth doing in the first month?+
Three things, in this order. Rekey every exterior cylinder so the keys from the sale stop working, at $29 to $46 each, and bring the front door, the garage service door and the pedestrian door onto one key while somebody is already there. Change any keypad code you were handed, because that code has passed through an agent, a stager, a cleaner and whoever held the open house. Then look properly at the lower door, since on a house of this age it is the one carrying sixty or seventy years of daily use and it is frequently running on a knob button with no deadbolt above it. At a median around $1.11 million the house turns over faster than the hardware on it does, and the set of people holding a key at closing is longer than anybody expects.
Open 24 hours, 7 days
Say which door you are standing at and the call gets short
Daly City and the north Peninsula, every hour of the day. The door decides the work and the work decides the number, so the figure comes back on the call with the $89 call-out and the hour already inside it, and it is the figure on the receipt. Ninety days on the labor, in writing.