Troubleshooting Standalone Locks

You may love being a locksmith and enjoy installing and repairing things, but as a professional businessperson, you have to think and work smart to survive and prosper.

Those lucky individuals who are not in business to make money have a different perspective than those with dependents, overhead and no reliable second income.

When you’re working in an environment where the owners or management are on missions other than to grow the business and do the right thing for the employees, you may want to think seriously about a job change.

As an employee, you are expected to follow instructions, and when those instructions are not serving the needs of you or your clients, you are in a no-win situation.

If all your co-workers think the boss is an idiot, and you are often doing damage control with angry customers, your peers may be right. Most customers would much rather be happy than have to fight with the locksmith in order to get the job done right. Maybe it is time to start your own business or look for a better job.

Sadly, dysfunction often exists within families.

Therefore within family businesses there may exist a situation where the business may only be existing on the merits of a long-passed founder, and the impressive qualities of capitalism and persistence of the buying habits of the public (a/k/a loyaly).

Folks remember the patriarch, and prefer to not rethink who they call for security. Since residential clients call infrequently, they may be calling because of the name recognition of the business, rather than because you’re doing a good job.

Commercial clients who are recurring clients will notice discrepancies faster, and are more likely to first complain and then stop calling you all together.

You may be a skilled craftsman and focused on doing a good job and the right thing for your clients, but if the boss doesn’t share your mission, you are on a course that will lead to a rendezvous with disappointment.

When we discuss troubleshooting standalone access devices, I am beginning with the assumption that you are called by a customer or dispatched to a location without any information other than there is a door and it doesn’t work.

All troubleshooting has common steps, whether it is electronic or mechanical, and troubleshooting should begin while you are making the initial contact with the customer.

Not gathering information beforehand is sabotaging you and reducing your likelihood of a successful service call, with success being defined as a service call where your company makes money and you have a satisfied customer. Ideally both of these conditions must be met, but customer-oriented businesses tend to put the welfare of the customer first. If you are in a situation where you cannot really make money, cut your losses without burning bridges behind you.

Key Questions

Ask pre screening questions like:

• What kind of lock is on the door? Is there a key in the lever? Is it electronic, mechanical or a standalone?
• Do you have a working key for the door? “It used to work but not today” is a good answer and gives you more options to resolve the problem beyond a battering ram.
• Who installed the lock? Often electronic locks are provided by an alarm company as part of a package, or by the landlord and are multiple door systems; or perhaps by your shop, only not by you, and so you have to find out first. If the lock was installed by others, it may be covered by a service contract or warranty. The end-user may not be thinking clearly, and just thinks that they called you to rekey file cabinets and desks, why not call you for the door too? You make a trip to the site for nothing. If you have to force the door or bypass the lock and in so doing damage it, you have a new set of problems, the most immediate of which is; Ok so you got them in, great, but what happens later when they want to lock up and go home?
• Is there an alternative means to gain access to the space? Distressed customers tend to over-react and may not think clearly. Also if you know you can get to the protected side of the door you will have more options for addressing the problem. Maybe if nothing else, remove the bad lock and install a loaner.
• If it is a standalone, can you identify the model number? If not, can you take a picture with your smartphone and text it? So even if the client doesn’t know what it is, and your dispatcher does not know either, you all can put your heads together and solve the mystery rather than just start the van and waste time and money.
• Are you the owner of the premises? Are you authorized to gain access? It is easy to get schmoozed into letting someone in without knowing they are in court over who owns what.

Once we rekeyed a business and actually provided an alarm system and other services to a business through the husband. He was the only contact person for the account, although we knew his wife was involved with the business. So when he called and said he lost his key and would we let him in, we did. It was only later when the wife’s attorney contacted us, did we learn they were in the midst of a nasty divorce.

We escaped litigation because the wife never notified us.    

Power (It’s In The Door)

If you are dealing with an electronic standalone lockset, you would be well advised to obtain the installation and programming documents for the device before you go much further. Your client will probably have a memorized PIN, but suddenly it stopped getting them in. Keypad locks typically provide the end-user with some audible or visual indicators to help them enter a code. A beep or LED will illuminate as each button is pressed. You may hear a mechanical noise when the code has been properly entered which is the solenoid in the device mechanically linking the lever to the latch so when the lever is actuated, the latch will retract.

If the lock is not producing the beeps or flashes it normally would, it may be the batteries. The battery pack is usually in an enclosed housing on the inside of the door which can be opened and the battery pack can then be observed, electrically tested, replaced and reinstalled. A digital voltmeter is the most obvious way to test the batteries, although if you have the unit apart, unless the batteries test full strength, you might as well replace them while you are there.

If the batteries are low, then with a little luck, replacing them will revive the lock. Standalones utilize non-volatile memory, which means removing the batteries does not cause the device to lose memory.

However if replacing the batteries does not help, at that point, a component failure within the standalone is indicated.

There are some other possibilities that have happened to me often enough that I feel the warrant being mentioned.

For example, you can hear the solenoid but the lever does not retract the latch. This can be a couple of things. One is the solenoid is bad. This has happened to me and it has taught me the lesson that having a working demo unit provides you not only an effective sales tool, but also a complete set of replacement parts. 

Replacing internal components falls under the heading of major surgery, so you may opt to install your demo as a loaner rather than take both the bad unit and your demo apart and perform an organ transplant. The urgency of the situation and the distance between your shop and the site will help you decide.

If the latch will not retract, you will have to get the door open in order to do just bout anything else. Getting the latch to retract can be as simple as using a shim made out of a plastic milk carton, or as ugly as chopping up the door.

Once in a while you will encounter a situation where the latch was not installed properly and the latch tabs do not engage with retractor jaws. There are clips (tabs) on the latch body that are supposed to interlock with corresponding fingers (retractor jaws) in the cylindrical lock.

Typically this was due to a sloppy installation where the installer didn’t confirm the proper interlock, or due to a bad door prep, it was difficult for the installer to get the latch and cylindrical lock body to properly align.

Sometimes you will encounter doors where the pre-drilling was so unprofessional that it is hard envision what was in the installer mind while he was drilling. The cross bore is not horizontal or the backset is way off.

It may be best and fastest to redrill the door so things line up properly. However, redrilling a door neatly is just about impossible without a fixture that will hold your hole saw and speed bore in position. On an existing door installation, you really cannot relocate the holes too much vertically, although as mentioned, there is frequently a problem with the backset. When the geometry and measurements of the prep are out of whack, locks are more difficult to install, and also may not work properly.

In some circles, a rite of passage to locksmithdom is to be to drill a door free-hand without using a drill fixture. The problem is there are a lot of guys out there who have never completed this rite of passage, but are banging out a lot of cock-eyed installs anyway.

The challenge of troubleshooting is identifying the unknown, and the mastery of troubleshooting is being able to resolve it.