7 Reasons a Smart Lock Could Be One of Your Smartest Decisions

A smart lock makes it easy to unlock your door when you arrive home, but they offer a number of less obvious benefits too. This ranges from ensuring you can never be locked out to remotely granting access to visitors.

How Do Smart Locks Work?

A smart lock (generally) replaces an interior latch with a motorized version. In other cases, the motor unit fits over the top of the existing latch. With the simplest of smart locks, the exterior of the lock remains unchanged, giving no visual clue that it’s anything out of the ordinary.

At the most sophisticated end, you get a new external unit with multiple means of unlocking. This may include a keypad, fingerprint reader, fob reader, and Bluetooth reader to allow unlocking with a smartphone or smartwatch. Some of the latest locks even support palm recognition or face recognition.

Once correctly activated, a signal is sent to the motorized unit to lock or unlock the door. In almost all cases, you still retain the option of manually unlocking the door using a conventional key. This can be important if you have some less-techy members of the household who don’t want to change what they do.

Some smart locks also retain your existing barrel, which is a worthwhile feature if you have an expensive, high-security lock.

Confirm That Your Home Is Secure, Remotely

Most of us have probably had the experience of leaving home in a hurry, then later wondering whether or not we locked the door. You might also have a concern that another household member has left your home unlocked. With a smart lock, a simple glance at an app will tell you whether or not the door is locked. If not, tapping a button will lock the door.

This can also be useful when you’re at home. If you’ve ever been tucked up in bed then wondered whether you locked the door when you came in, glancing at your smartphone is easier than getting out of bed to check!

Automatically Lock and Unlock the Door

Even better than checking whether or not your home is secure is knowing that it is. A smart lock can be configured to automatically lock after a fixed time period of say 30 seconds or two minutes. Every time you unlock the door, a timer will begin. When the timer concludes, the door will automatically lock.

Some smart locks also offer automatic unlocking as you approach the door. This is generally triggered by your smartphone or smartwatch coming within Bluetooth range. That makes for a pleasant welcome home and can be especially useful if your hands are full when you get home from the grocery store.

Ensure You Can Never Be Locked Out

With conventional locks, there’s only one way to unlock the door when nobody’s home, and that’s with your key. If you lose your key or leave your keyring behind somewhere, the result can be a very expensive visit from a locksmith. If you’re lucky, they can let you in without damaging the lock or the door; if you’re unlucky, then you might need to buy a completely new lock and replace everyone’s keys.

With a smart lock, you generally have multiple ways to gain access. That might be by using your phone to unlock the door, entering a code number on a keypad, or touching a fingerprint sensor. Most smart locks can also be controlled remotely using an app, so in the worst case of losing your keys and your smartphone, you can ask another household member to remotely unlock the door for you.

Trigger Welcome-Home Automations

Most smart home systems support what’s known as presence-detection. They should detect that your smartphone has returned home (usually by joining the home Wi-Fi network), and that allows you to trigger automations like switching on interior lighting. However, presence detection can sometimes take a little time to kick in, so a smart lock can be a faster and more reliable method.

In my apartment, for example, unlocking my front door triggers an automation to switch on the entrance lights between certain hours. That’s a practical benefit when I’m carrying things, but also makes for a pleasant feeling of being welcomed home.

Grant Remote Access to Visitors

Remote locking and unlocking can be great if a friend or family member is visiting and gets there before you. You can use an app to unlock the door for them to let them in.

Some smart locks have more sophisticated visitor abilities. For example, if you have a cleaner who visits on Tuesday afternoons, you can give them a code that will only unlock the door on that day and between specified hours. If you have a contractor who needs access while they are working in your home, you can activate a code for them at the start of the job and de-activate it when they’ve finished.

This eliminates concerns about giving someone a key and then wondering whether they’ve had a copy made.

Receive Notifications When People Arrive

A smart lock can send a notification to your phone every time the door is locked or unlocked. This provides reassurance that a family member has safely arrived at home when you’re away. In larger homes, this can also be useful when you’re at home by letting you know that your kids have come home from school when you’re in another part of the house.

Create Far More Complex Automations

Depending on the sophistication of your smart home system, you may be able to create much more intricate automations. For example, in a Reddit thread about the Home Assistant smart home platform, a user described configuring the front door to unlock if the smoke detectors are activated, ensuring everyone can leave the home without needing to first unlock the door.

If you’re now convinced of the benefits, there are a few things to consider when choosing a smart lock, before you move on to finding a smart lock to suit your budget. If you’re all-in on the Apple ecosystem, Home Key is a really great feature, allowing reliable automatic unlocking triggered by your iPhone or Apple Watch, though there are only a few compatible locks so far.

Smart locks also pair well with smart doorbells by allowing you to check who is at the door while you’re out before deciding whether to let them in.