There’s a major variety of door makes and models available on the market today, so large of a variety that it can be difficult for the average consumer to determine what door would work best for their residential or commercial needs. As professional locksmith experts, the team at SOS Locksmiths regularly helps assess each one of our client’s needs, and then recommend a door perfect for them. We’ve prepared this short list of the qualities everyone should be looking for when determining the best doors for their needs – so keep them in mind if you’re door shopping on your own.
Lock Cylinder Structuring
You want the structure of your lock cylinder to be as complex as possible in order to prevent burglars from potentially figuring out. The harder it is to understand the internal mechanisms of a lock, the less chances of a burglar operating a bump key to open your door or pick the lock.
Amount of Metal
The strength of a lock depends on how much metal it uses. Since a portion of the door is usually removed in order to install the door lock, requiring the boring of holes that temporarily leave the door vulnerable in the space around the lock hardware, the metal of the lock needs to compensate for this space. You can usually tell that a lock has good metal content by weight – properly metallic locks don’t have large gaps in them or large elements of plastic associated with cost reduction. When companies make locks with plastic or empty space as shown above this will cost you large amounts of money for security. High security locks need lots of strong and weighty metal.
Bolts
You want your deadbolt itself to have a large amount of force resistance – usually hard steel bolts are the best at resisting physical attacks from hammers or kicks, as well as cutting with saws.
Drills
Drilling is a fast way of getting through a lock, which is why many burglars rely on it as an easy tactic for entry. If your high security door lock is protected from drills, it likely has strong set screws and shear lines protected with hard steel ball bearings, or anti drill strike plates that rotate in a way that protects people from drilling through the shear line.
Keys
You want to make sure that nobody can make a copy of your house key with zero permission. The best way of doing this is investing in high security door locks with patented keyways, thus restricting access to your key blanks. You also want to make sure that you never lose your spare keys, as this is the only real way that you can protect yourself.
Bypassing
Even high quality security door locks can be bypassed with the help of technology; a notorious example of this is the thumbturn bypass method for some high security euro cylinder locks. Bypassing isn’t exactly the same as lock bumping or picking – they are much more simple, graceful, and sort of insidious access methods that exploits the specific weaknesses of your locks. You want to make sure that your lock doesn’t have an exposed bypass method – and even many of the best brands’ older lock models have bypass methods that today’s burglars have figured out.
