These are the questions Bayside homeowners, shareholders and shop owners ask before a smart lock goes on a door, grouped by situation: storm doors and key-free locks, the doorbell test burglars use, new owners and phone keys, and businesses. Measuring period doors, lock grades, code security and data are covered in the hardware notes that follow the equipment list. Pricing, scheduling and coverage are in the FAQ further down. Nothing here is legal advice; where a rule is mentioned we name it so you can read it yourself.
Storm doors and locks without keys
A full-glass storm door covers our sunny front door all summer — can the heat trapped between the two doors hurt a smart lock?
Yes, it can, and it is one of the more common reasons a keypad on a Bayside Colonial starts misbehaving in July. Storm-door suppliers warn that full-glass storm doors trap heat against the entry door; Storm Door Guy, for example, says that heat can damage paint and warp wood doors. A lock in that space is sitting in the same heat. Manufacturers publish operating ranges for this reason: Schlage lists minus 31°F to 150.8°F for the outside body of its Encode Plus and 14°F to 120.2°F for the inside body. A south- or west-facing door behind clear glass on a summer afternoon can approach the top of ranges like those.
There are three practical answers. Swap the storm door's glass panel for its screen panel from late spring to early autumn, which many full-view storm doors are designed to allow — check yours has an interchangeable panel. Choose a lock with a wide published outside range and check it before you buy. Or, on the hottest exposures, put the keyless feature on a side or rear door that sits in shade and leave the front door on a good mechanical deadbolt.
We test the door at the walkthrough by feeling the existing hardware after the storm door has been closed in the sun for a while, and we tell you which of those answers suits your house. Batteries are the other casualty of heat; locks behind hot glass tend to need fresh cells sooner.
Would a keyless-only model with no key cylinder at all be safer on our front door, or riskier?
Both, depending on what you are worried about. Keyless-only smart deadbolts exist — Yale, for instance, sells “Key-Free” versions of its Assure Lock 2 touchscreen — and removing the cylinder removes the one part of the lock that can be picked or bumped. For a household that has lost track of how many keys are out there, that has real appeal.
The trade-off is how you get in when the electronics can't help. Key-free models rely on external emergency power, typically a 9-volt battery held to contacts on the outside, when the internal batteries die. That works, but only if somebody has a 9-volt battery when they need one, and only if the fault is the batteries rather than the electronics. There is no physical override for a failed board.
Our usual advice in Bayside is a keyed smart lock on the front door, with the key kept somewhere sensible and not hidden by the door, and a key-free model only on a second door where the first one gives you a way in. If you want a key-free lock on your only entrance, we will fit it, but we will make sure you understand the emergency-power routine first.
Doorbells and the empty-house test
The pair who tried a Bayside back slider in 2025 rang the doorbell first to see if anyone was home — can our doorbell and lock answer for us when the house is empty?
They can make the house a great deal less convincing as empty. In the attempt QNS described near 202nd Street and 36th Avenue, the doorbell was rung repeatedly before neighbors raised the alarm. A plain doorbell rung at an empty house tells the person on the step exactly what they want to know. A video doorbell answers that test differently: it alerts your phone, records the person, and lets you speak through it from wherever you are, so a ring that would have been met with silence is met with a voice.
The lock is the second half. When you see who is at the door, you also want to know that the front, side and back doors are actually locked, and to lock any that aren't without going home. A connected smart lock reports its own state to the same phone, and many lock and doorbell makers allow the two to sit in one app or one smart-home platform. We set it up so the alert, the video and the lock status are on one screen.
What neither does is stop someone who decides to break a slider anyway. That is the job of a secondary bar or pin lock on the slider, a contact sensor, and an alarm — which is why we often quote the lock, the doorbell and a slider contact together for houses in the precinct.
New owners and new ways in
The house we bought near Bell Boulevard came with the seller's keypad lock but nobody knows the master code — can it be wiped and made ours?
Usually yes, because most smart locks are designed so that a factory reset needs access to the inside of the door, which you now have and a stranger outside does not. On many models the reset is done by removing the inside cover or battery pack and holding a reset button, or by a button sequence while the batteries are reconnected; the exact procedure is in the maker's manual and differs from model to model. A reset clears every user code, fingerprint and pairing, including the old owner's.
The app account is the second step. Connected locks are usually registered to a person's account with the manufacturer, and some won't join a new account until the old owner has removed them or the maker's support team has released them. After a factory reset many will simply pair as new; when they won't, we contact the manufacturer with proof of ownership of the house. Then the mechanical side: a keypad lock still has a key cylinder, and the seller's keys still fit it, so we re-key or replace the cylinder at the same visit.
Sometimes the honest answer is that the lock is not worth keeping — an old model the maker no longer supports, an app that no longer updates, or a keypad worn smooth. We tell you that before spending your money on resetting it.
Should our family use the phone-tap “home key” feature, or stick with codes?
Use both, and don't rely on the phone alone. Several current smart deadbolts let a phone or watch act as a key by tapping it on the lock, much like a transit card; Yale's Assure Lock 2 Plus with Home Keys is one example sold in hardware stores. It is genuinely convenient for adults who always carry a phone, and it means one less code to remember.
The weak points are the ones you'd expect. Phones get lost, replaced and run flat, and a phone-key setup depends on the phone platform and the lock's own batteries both behaving. Owners have posted online about being shut out when a lock's batteries died and the phone tap couldn't help, and having to buy a 9-volt battery to power the lock from outside.
So in a Bayside family house we set phone keys for the people who want them, a personal code for everyone, fingerprints where the lock supports them, and a mechanical key kept with a trusted neighbor or relative. Every person leaves the walkthrough with at least two ways in that don't depend on the same device.
Bell Boulevard and other business doors
The last bartender leaves our Bell Boulevard place after midnight — how can I check from home that the front and back doors actually latched?
By measuring the door, not just the bolt. Most smart locks report whether their own bolt is extended. That is useful, but on a busy restaurant back door it can be misleading: a bolt can be thrown while the door is still resting against the frame, unlatched, and some locks will report that as “locked”. What you actually want to know is that the door is shut and the bolt is in the strike.
We get there with a door-position sensor — a small contact in the frame, or a lock model that has one built in — so the app shows “closed” and “locked” as two separate facts. Then we set a closing-time check: if either door is open or unlocked after the time you choose, you and one manager get a notification. Each employee gets their own code, so the log shows who locked up.
On the street door of a bar, a keypad deadbolt is often enough. On a back door that takes deliveries, a keypad with an electric strike and a push-to-exit button inside can be better, because the door locks itself the moment it closes. That is the single-door keypad and strike package priced below at our Queens rate.
