Questions Dyker Heights owners, builders, condo boards and business owners ask us about new entry systems, grouped by the part of the job they concern. Each answer is the one we would give on the phone, before anyone has been out.
Gates, yards and doors
Getting cable from our front gate to the house means crossing a paved path and part of the driveway. Do you dig it up, cut a slot, or go wireless?
It depends on what the paving is and how much you care about it. Across poured concrete or asphalt, a narrow saw-cut slot with the cable in a small conduit, sealed over, is usually the cleanest and lasts as long as the paving. Across pavers or stone, we can often lift a single row, lay conduit beneath, and reset them, which leaves no visible patch. Where the paving is new, decorative or expensive to match, we look first for a route around it, along the fence and the side of the walk, even if that is a longer run.
Wireless is the fallback, not the first choice. A wireless link between the gate and the house avoids the paving entirely, but it needs power at the gate, either a battery that someone has to change or a small power cable that brings back the trench question, and it needs a clear signal through whatever stands between the gate and the inside unit. We test the signal at the gate before quoting it.
Whichever route we choose is written on the quote with its price, including the patching. If the ground is frozen hard in midwinter and a trench is the only route, we say so and offer the next workable date rather than patching a slot that will crack in the spring.
Our driveway gate already has its own motor and remote openers. Can the door station open it too, or does it need a separate intercom?
Usually the door station can trigger it. Most gate operators have an input for an external push button or a relay, the same input a wall button in the house would use, and a door station with a spare relay output can close that contact when someone at the station is let in. That lets one call open the walk gate, the driveway gate, or either one, from the same indoor monitor or phone.
Before we promise it, we need the make and model of the gate operator and a photo of its control board. Some operators are under a service contract with the company that installed them, and some newer ones are app-controlled with no spare input. In those cases the simplest answer may be a separate button on the indoor monitor wired to the operator, or leaving the car gate on its remotes and handling only the walk gate.
One safety point: a motorized gate must keep its own safety sensors and reversing functions. The door station only sends the same open command a wall button would. It never bypasses anything in the operator.
The lock on our front gate is on the swinging iron leaf, not on the post. How does a release get power on a gate that moves?
Through a protected cable loop at the hinge side, or by moving the electric part to the post. The usual way is a flexible armored loop that crosses from the fixed post to the moving leaf at the hinges, so the cable bends as the gate swings without being pinched. The release on the leaf is then wired through the gate's frame or along its rail.
Often it is simpler to reverse the arrangement: put an electric strike or keeper on the fixed post, where power is easy to reach, and keep the mechanical latch on the leaf. That works when the gate closes squarely against the post. On older iron gates that sag or bind, the gate has to be rehung or adjusted first, or no release will work reliably.
Either way, the station itself goes on the fixed pier or post, never on the moving leaf, so it is not shaken every time the gate slams.
Our rebuilt house has a tall pivot front door. Can it take an electric release?
Sometimes, but it needs a release chosen for that door. A pivot door turns on a pin near one edge instead of on hinges, and many have a long latch or a multipoint lock on the opposite edge. A standard strike does not fit those. The options are an electric strike made for the specific latch, a motorized multipoint lock from the door's own manufacturer, or, on a door that will never have one, leaving the front door on its key and putting the release on the gate or a side door.
We ask for the door's make and the lock's model before quoting. If the manufacturer offers a motorized lock for that door, it is usually the cleanest option, because it is designed for the door's weight and seal. Fitting a generic strike into a premium pivot door's frame risks damaging a door that cost far more than the entry system.
Our 1970s house still has a room-to-room intercom with speakers in several rooms. Can its wiring carry a new video system?
Often, yes. Old whole-house intercoms were usually wired with multi-conductor cable from a master unit to each room speaker and to the door. That cable, if it tests clean, can frequently carry a two-wire system, which needs only one good pair between the door station and each indoor station. Aiphone's upgrade guide puts it simply: "If the existing wires are in good condition, they can be reused."
The test is what decides it. We check each run for continuity, shorts and damage at both ends, and we find where each one actually goes, because cable in houses that age has often been cut, spliced or abandoned. Good runs get reused; bad ones get replaced or bypassed. The old master unit and room speakers come out and the openings are covered with plates or the new stations themselves, so you do not end up with dead speakers in the walls.
If the old cable is beyond saving, the fallback is a route through the cellar and up a stacked closet or chase, or wireless indoor units on the upper floors where running cable would mean opening finished walls.
Packages, neighbors and households
Our neighbors and we take in each other's deliveries. Can a neighbor's phone be set up to answer our gate for a courier, and taken off again later?
On many video stations with app answering, yes. The owner of the system can add another person as a user, choose whether that person can only see and talk to the visitor or can also release the door, and remove them at any time. A neighbor who is home in the daytime can then answer a courier at your gate, tell them to leave the box inside the yard, and open the gate for a few seconds.
We set this up deliberately at handover: who is on the list, what each person can do, and how to remove them. We also recommend that a neighbor's access be limited to the gate or the outer porch door, never the house door, so the arrangement covers parcels and nothing else.
Our dental practice uses the ground floor of the house our family lives in. Can patients be buzzed into the office during hours without being able to reach the stairs to our home?
Yes, and it usually takes two doors and two schedules. The practice gets its own station at its entrance, answered at the front desk, with a release on the practice door only. The family's door, or the inner door to the family's stair, stays on its own station and its own release, answered upstairs. Patients can be let in to the waiting room but have no way to open the family's door, and the family's visitors never ring the front desk.
Where the practice and the family share one outer door, the outer door gets a two-button station, one for the office and one for the house, and the inner doors do the separating. Many systems also let the office button be set to ring the front desk only during office hours and to ring the house, or nobody, after closing, so a late visitor does not reach an empty desk.
New buildings and small condos
We are building an 11-apartment rental on a side street. Which trade should carry the entry system in the bid package: the general contractor, the electrician or a low-voltage installer?
Any of the three can carry it, but one of them has to own it from the drawings to the final test. The common working split is that the electrician provides the 120-volt circuit and any conduit and boxes the plans call for, and the low-voltage installer supplies the system, pulls or approves the entry cable, terminates, programs and tests. The general contractor coordinates the door hardware so the main entrance arrives ready for a strike or an approved lock.
What causes trouble is leaving the system unchosen until late. Then the electrician pulls a generic cable to every apartment, the door is ordered without a prepared frame, and the installer arrives to find the wrong cable and a door that cannot take a release. If you bring us in at the drawing stage, we give the electrician a cable and box schedule and the door supplier a hardware note, and the bid prices line up.
Because a new building of 11 apartments falls under the Multiple Dwelling Law's intercom requirement, the system should be in, tested and documented before the building is occupied.
Our new building has open parking at the back, and residents will mostly come in through the rear door. Should that door have a full intercom panel too?
Usually not a full visitor panel, but it does need real access control. If visitors can ring at both the front and the back, they will choose whichever is closer to where they parked, and the rear door becomes a second lobby with nobody watching it. The better arrangement in most small buildings is a resident-only reader or keypad at the rear door, plus a small sign directing visitors to the front panel.
The rear door also needs the basics that the front gets: a strike or approved lock that relatches every time, a closer strong enough to pull it shut in wind, good lighting and a camera if the owner has one elsewhere. Where the owner does want visitors to use the rear, a compact station there that calls the same apartments keeps the directory in one place.
The store on our new corner building's ground floor will take deliveries after hours. Should its door be on the same entry system as the 22 apartments above?
No. Keep them separate. The apartments' system should serve residents and their visitors only, with a directory, codes and permissions managed for the building. The store's door should have its own station, answered at the counter or on the store manager's phone, with its own release and its own users. Mixing them means a store employee or a delivery driver ends up holding a code or a permission that opens the residents' door, and a tenant turnover at the store becomes a security question for the whole building.
Separate systems can still share infrastructure the owner controls, such as conduit space and an equipment room, but the store's equipment should be the tenant's to manage under its lease. We price the two as separate scopes so the owner can bill the commercial tenant if the lease says so.
The 2007 rezoning left our block zoned for detached houses only. Does that zoning limit what we can mount on the front of the house or on the gate?
Not for the entry system itself. Zoning decides what kind of building can stand on the lot, how big it can be and how it is used; CityLand's account of the 2007 rezoning describes districts limited to detached houses, others allowing semi-detached houses, and rowhouse districts at the edges. A door station on a gate pier, an electric strike in a door frame and a low-voltage cable in a trench are not what those rules govern.
Where something else can come into play is a new structure. If the plan is to build new masonry piers or a new fence to hold the gate station, that is construction, and the owner should confirm what is allowed for front-yard walls and fences before a mason starts. We mount on what is there; we do not build piers or fences. Separately, if a house is an individual city landmark, exterior changes go through the Landmarks Preservation Commission first.
The zoning does shape the job in one practical way: because so much of the neighborhood is detached houses set back from the sidewalk, the gate-to-house route described above is the normal case here rather than the exception.
