Most of what Bay Ridge households ask us comes down to time: when a code works, when the door locks itself, what the lock should say when nothing happens, and how to read what it recorded. The questions are grouped that way.
Clocks, calendars and schedules
The clocks go back an hour in November — do the timed codes on our lock move with them, and what keeps the lock's own clock right?
On a lock that is connected to the internet, usually yes. The lock or its bridge takes the time from the manufacturer's servers, which know the local time zone and the daylight-saving dates, so a code set for 7:30 to 9:00 a.m. keeps meaning 7:30 to 9:00 local time on the Monday after the change. In the United States daylight saving time ends on the first Sunday in November and starts on the second Sunday in March, and a connected lock should cross both without anyone touching it.
The weak spot is a lock that has lost its connection, or one that never had it. A Bluetooth-only lock keeps time with its own internal clock and only resets it when a phone with the app comes close enough to sync. If it has been out of contact for weeks, or if its batteries ran flat and it restarted, its clock can be wrong, and every schedule moves with it. That is how an aide's code ends up working an hour late, or a curfew starting at midnight instead of eleven.
Our habit is simple. We set the lock's time zone explicitly during setup rather than trusting a default, we check the lock's reported time against a phone before we leave, and we show you where the app displays it. After every battery change, and on the Monday after each clock change, open the app near the door once and look at the time. If it's right, every schedule is right.
Our cleaner comes every other Thursday — can a lock schedule follow a fortnightly pattern?
It depends on the app, and many can't. Most residential lock apps build recurring codes from days of the week and a time window: every Thursday, 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. Far fewer offer “every second week” or a custom repeat. If yours doesn't, a weekly Thursday code gives the cleaner access on the off-weeks too, which is exactly the slack you were trying to remove.
There are three practical workarounds. The tidiest is a code with a start and end date for each visit, scheduled a few weeks ahead — tedious to set up, but exact. Some apps allow a code to be switched on and off with a tap, so you leave it disabled and enable it on the morning of a cleaning day; that only works if someone remembers. And some smart-home platforms that a lock can join through Matter, Z-Wave or a hub let you write a fortnightly rule that enables and disables the code automatically.
At the walkthrough, tell us the patterns you actually need — fortnightly cleaners, alternate-weekend custody, a relative who visits on the first Sunday of the month — and we'll choose a lock and platform that can express them, or set up the dated codes for you and show you how to extend them.
Can the street door of our two-family lock itself at 11 every night, whoever left it on the latch?
Yes, on many smart locks, and it's one of the most useful settings for a shared front door. There are two features to know apart. Auto-relock throws the bolt a set time after the door closes or is unlocked; it handles the everyday case of someone coming in and forgetting. A scheduled lock-up, where the lock or a smart-home rule locks the door at a fixed time each night, handles the cases auto-relock doesn't — a hold-open or “passage” mode someone switched on to bring in shopping, or a door unlocked from the app for a visitor who has since left.
For a two-family, we usually set both. Auto-relock with a delay long enough to get a stroller or a bag of groceries through, and a nightly lock-up time agreed by both households, so that whatever happened during the day the street door is bolted by eleven. Household codes still open it at any hour; the schedule only makes sure it doesn't stay open.
One condition: the bolt must line up cleanly with the strike every time, or a lock that relocks itself on a timer will jam, buzz and drain its batteries. That's why we adjust the strike and the door before we switch automatic locking on, and why we test it several times with the door closed gently, the way a tired person closes it at night.
Relatives fly in from abroad for six weeks every summer — can their code start the day they land and stop the day they fly home?
Yes. Most lock apps can create a code that is valid between two dates, sometimes called a temporary or date-range code. Set it to begin on the arrival day and expire the evening of the departure, and it switches itself on and off without anyone remembering. During those six weeks it works like a household code, at any hour; you can add a daily time window as well if you'd rather it didn't work in the small hours.
It is worth giving a long-stay visitor a code rather than a spare key, for the same reason as everyone else: a code can't be copied at a hardware counter, it ends on its own, and it leaves a record. If your visitors don't use smartphones, that's fine — a keypad code needs no app on their side at all.
Two practical points for visitors from overseas. Write the code and the lock's quirks (press the logo to wake the keypad, wait for the green light) on a card, because an unfamiliar keypad in the dark after a long flight is harder than it sounds. And make sure the code's dates are entered in New York time; an app opened on a phone set to another country's time zone can shift the window by hours.
Older parents, carers and the empty middle of the day
Can the lock tell us if Mom's front door hasn't opened at all by midday?
Some systems can, though few locks offer it as a single switch. Most lock apps notify you when something happens — a code used, the door unlocked, a wrong code entered. An alert when nothing happens by a certain time is a different kind of rule, and it usually lives in a smart-home platform that the lock reports to, or in a door sensor paired with the lock, where you can write “if the door has not opened by noon on a weekday, notify me”.
For an older parent living alone, especially one who goes out every morning — to church, to the shops on Third Avenue, to the Bay Ridge Center, which Healthbeat reported had tripled its membership to more than 2,000 — that silence is meaningful. It isn't a medical alarm and shouldn't be treated as one: a parent may simply be staying in with a cold. But it prompts a phone call hours earlier than anyone would otherwise make one.
We set it up only with the parent's agreement, explain exactly what the family can and can't see, and keep it to the information that matters — whether the door opened, not a minute-by-minute diary. Where a parent's health makes a fall a real worry, a proper personal emergency response device does that job far better than any lock, and we'll say so.
I'm deploying from Fort Hamilton for nine months — how should control of our lock pass to my spouse or a relative while I'm away?
Fort Hamilton, whose cornerstone was laid in 1825, is described by Military OneSource as the only active-duty military installation in the greater New York City area, so plenty of service households rent or own in Bay Ridge. If the lock's owner account is on your phone and your email, a deployment is the time to fix that, before you go rather than from overseas. Whoever stays behind should hold full administrator rights in their own name, on their own phone, with the ability to add and delete codes and remove users — not just a code of their own.
Most lock apps allow a second owner or administrator; we add it, confirm it works by having them change a test code while you watch, and record the account details somewhere safe. If nobody is staying in the home, the person who will look in on it needs admin rights too, and the lock's notifications should go to them, since you may not see an alert for days.
Two things beyond the lock. If you rent, tell the landlord who will be holding access while you're away, and keep the duplicate key or code arrangement the lease requires. And anything about legal authority to act for you — a power of attorney, a lease change — is a question for your installation's legal assistance office, not for us. We make sure the door does what the paperwork says.
Our ornate wood door has an iron grille bolted over its glass panel — does that change where the smart lock can go?
Often it does. Many older Bay Ridge doors, on limestone rows and on the 1920s semi-detached houses alike, have a glazed upper panel protected by decorative ironwork. The grille's frame and mounting bolts can come down close to the existing lock, leaving less clear wood than a smart deadbolt's outside keypad needs. A keypad squeezed against a grille is hard to press, catches rain running off the ironwork, and can't be removed for service without loosening the grille.
So we measure three things on these doors: the clear wood between the grille's lowest point and the bore, the width of the stile beside the glass, and the door's thickness, since these doors are often heavier than the 1⅜- to 2-inch range many smart deadbolts list. If the standard position doesn't clear, the choices are a compact keypad model, a retrofit lock that changes only the inside of an existing deadbolt and leaves the outside as it is, or moving the lock a short distance lower with the old hole properly plugged.
The grille does help in one way: it makes reaching through broken glass to the inside thumb-turn much harder than on an unprotected pane. We check that it is fixed from the inside or with security fasteners, because a grille held on by four ordinary screws on the outside protects less than it looks.
Reading the record
The app shows our front door unlocked at 3:12 a.m. and nobody remembers doing it — how do we work out what happened?
Start with how the lock says it was opened, because most apps record the method as well as the time. An entry tagged with a person's code or phone points to that person. An entry tagged “manual” or “thumb-turn” means someone turned it by hand — usually from inside, which is reassuring, though some locks record a key in the cylinder the same way. An entry tagged “auto-unlock” or “geofence” means a phone's location feature decided someone was arriving, which can misfire when a household member's phone briefly loses and regains its location nearby at night.
Then look at what came either side of it. A door that unlocked and relocked a few seconds later with no door-open event between suggests a glitch or a hand on the thumb-turn, not an entry. A door-position sensor, if the lock has one, tells you whether the door actually swung open. And a video doorbell or camera at the door settles the question in a way a log alone can't.
If you still can't explain it, change the codes that could have been used, switch off location-based auto-unlock until you've worked out whose phone is responsible, and tell us — we'll go through the history with you. Many locks don't record use of the mechanical key at all, which is one more reason to know exactly who still holds one.
Can each code carry a name, so the history reads “cleaner” rather than a slot number?
On nearly every current lock with an app, yes, and it's the single change that makes the history worth reading. Codes are stored in numbered slots inside the lock, but the app lets you give each one a label. A history that says “Upstairs tenant, 2:10 a.m.” and “Aide, 8:02 a.m.” can be scanned in seconds; one that says “User 4” and “User 7” needs a separate list nobody keeps up to date.
We name every code at setup and keep the names to roles rather than full names where privacy matters — “dog walker” rather than the walker's name, which also means you don't rename anything when the walking company sends someone new. We also give each person their own code instead of a shared one, because a shared code makes every name in the history meaningless.
Keypad-only locks without an app usually have no names at all, just slot numbers. If the history matters to you, that alone is a reason to choose a connected model.
Restaurants, practices and the avenues
Burglars hit Third Avenue restaurants between 3 and 4:30 a.m. in August 2026 — can our staff codes simply stop working between closing and opening?
Yes, and for a late-closing kitchen it's one of the best settings available. Give every employee their own code and attach a schedule to it that covers their shifts plus a margin. Outside that window the code is refused and the attempt is logged. A code that a former dishwasher shared with a friend, or one read over a shoulder at the back door, is then useless at 3 a.m., which is exactly when PIX11 reported three Third Avenue restaurants were burglarised on August 28, 2026.
The owner and one or two managers keep round-the-clock codes for emergencies. Every door — front, back, cellar hatch where there is one — should report any opening during the closed hours to the owner's phone. A smart lock can't stop a door being broken, and the 2026 reports don't say how the doors were opened; what it can do is make sure no code opens it after hours, record the exact time something happened, and get that information to you in the night instead of when the prep cook arrives.
For doors that see constant traffic during service, a wired reader with an electric strike is more durable than a battery deadbolt and keeps a better log; it's priced from our published single-door figure further down. Either way, the door must still let people out freely from inside, curfew or not.
Our practice opens at 8, but on a snow day nobody comes in — can the front door wait for the first employee instead of unlocking by the clock?
Yes, on systems that support it. A plain schedule unlocks the waiting-room door at 8:00 whether or not anyone is there — on a snow day, on a holiday nobody programmed, or on the morning the office manager is stuck on the R train. A “first person in” rule waits until an authorised staff member opens the door with their own credential during the opening window, and only then holds it unlocked for the rest of the day's hours.
This rule is more common on commercial access-control systems than on consumer smart locks, so a practice that wants it usually ends up with a wired reader and electric strike on the main entrance, controlled by software that understands schedules, holidays and first-in logic. Inner doors — records rooms, medication storage, staff areas — stay locked to everyone except the staff who need them, on their own codes or fobs.
If you'd rather keep a battery smart lock on a small practice, the simpler alternative is to have the first person in unlock it from the app or switch on a hold-open mode, with a scheduled lock-up at closing time so it can't be left open overnight.
