Smart Lock Installation in Daly City

If a household here is going to own one smart lock, it should go on the garage-level door. That is the opening that takes every arrival, every hand full of shopping, every teenager back from Serramonte and the last turn of the key at night. The front door at the top of the outside stair sees guests and deliveries. Putting the keypad on the pretty door and leaving the working door on a sixty-year-old cylinder is the mistake people make most often, and it costs the whole benefit.

Now the part the box does not mention. A smart lock is designed for a door built to today's standard: a cross bore of two and one eighth inches, an edge bore of one inch, a backset of two and three eighths or two and three quarters, and a leaf that still hangs square. A door from this tract frequently answers none of those. The bore was drilled for a smaller builder cylinder. The backset may not match. And after decades on three hinges on ground that runs from sea level to 780 feet, with a live landslide at Mussel Rock and slopes that keep working, the leaf has moved. You feel it as a door you lift a little with the handle to get the bolt home. Your hand has been quietly compensating for years.

A motor cannot lift a door. That sentence is the whole problem. When the leaf has dropped a few millimeters, the bolt meets the lip of the strike instead of the pocket, and a person shoves through that while a motor stalls, retries, drains the cells and finally reports a jam. It gets blamed on the brand. The brand was rarely at fault.

So the door is put right first and the lock goes on second, in one visit. In practice that is some combination of shimming the hinge leaves or easing the top corner so the leaf hangs square, moving the strike and recutting its pocket to where the bolt actually lands now, fitting a box strike on three-inch screws, and opening the cross bore to two and one eighth inches with a jig so the escutcheon sits flat instead of on a rock. Because the plan repeats, that carpentry is predictable work rather than a discovery, and it is quoted from what you describe on the phone.

Two conditions get insisted on regardless of model. Keep a working keyway, because cells go flat on the worst possible morning and a door with no mechanical route in is a lockout with a date on it. Where the model keeps a cylinder it is pinned to the key already on your ring and a metal key is cut at the van before anyone leaves. And on an exposed door near the ocean, the exterior half gets chosen for the weather rather than for the app, since the motor drive and the bolt corrode exactly like any other steel out here. Setup happens with you standing there, the app goes on your phone rather than the technician's, you enter the first codes yourself, and the installer default never stays on a door this shop has fitted.

Installation is $189 to $479 with the $89 call-out inside it, and the spread describes the door rather than the lock. A leaf that hangs true with a bore already at size is the $189 end and a short visit. A leaf that has shifted and needs a strike relocated, or an original narrow bore that has to be opened, is the $479 end and is a couple of hours of carpentry followed by a lock. Two identical locks on two houses built to the same plan will land at opposite ends of that range. Ninety days on the workmanship, which here covers the carpentry too.