These are the questions Great Kills owners actually put to us, grouped by where they come from — the townhouse rows, the boating households, the family house — and answered the way we would answer them standing at the door.
Living in a townhouse row
Three households in our townhouse row want smart locks — can one visit cover the whole row while each house keeps its own account?
Yes, and it is one of the more efficient ways to do it. We survey each house in turn on the same day, because mirror-image doors are rarely identical in practice: one may have been replaced, one may have a storm door, one may have a warped jamb. Each household gets its own written quote and pays for its own door, so nobody is subsidising a neighbour's extra work. On installation day we work through the row in one visit where the parts allow.
What we do not do is put the houses on one shared account. Each household creates its own app account, with two of its own administrators, and its own codes. If neighbours want to exchange emergency codes, that is their choice, and we would suggest a temporary code each side can delete rather than permanent access. We also note each door's handing, the lock model and the battery type on a sheet for each house, which makes later service quicker for everyone.
A whole-row booking also helps with appearance. If the row looks better with matching finishes, we can supply the same model in the same finish to each house, while still keeping the accounts completely separate.
When the townhouse association's painters redo every front door, should the smart lock come off first, and who puts it back on?
Yes, it should come off. Painters working around a smart lock tend to tape over the keypad, paint up to the edge of the escutcheon or get paint into the bolt opening, and the inside unit's cable can be damaged if someone tries to loosen it without knowing how it connects. Paint built up on the door edge or the strike also makes a motorised bolt work harder, which shortens battery life and can cause jam alerts.
Before the painters arrive, either take the lock off yourself following the manufacturer's instructions or book a short visit for us to remove it, bag the parts and label the screws. Leave the deadbolt hole and latch bore clean and masked. Once the paint has cured, the lock goes back on, the bolt and strike are checked for alignment, and the codes are tested. Most locks keep their codes in memory without batteries; a few need re-enrolling, and we will tell you which yours is.
If your association is organising the painting, it is worth asking whether it can schedule the doors in a block so that one visit removes and refits the locks for several houses at once.
We pressure-wash the front of the townhouse and the driveway every spring — can the spray damage the keypad?
It can. Exterior smart locks are built to cope with rain, but a pressure washer drives water at a force and angle no weather does, and it can push water past the keypad gasket, into the key cylinder or behind the outside escutcheon. The result may not show at once; corrosion on the contacts or a keypad that fails a few weeks later is more typical.
Keep the nozzle well away from the door hardware and use a low-pressure rinse around the door itself. Cover the keypad with a plastic bag and painter's tape while the rest of the front is washed, and remove it afterwards so trapped moisture can dry. If the door surround must be cleaned close up, use a cloth and a bucket. The same goes for anyone you hire to do the job: tell them the lock is electronic.
If water does get in and the keypad misbehaves, take the batteries out, let the lock dry for a day and try again before assuming it has failed. If it still does not respond, call us before you order a replacement.
Households that live by the harbour
Our yacht club gives members a gate code — is it safe to use the same number for the front door at home?
We advise against it. A club gate code is, by its nature, known to many people: other members, staff, and anyone who has watched it being entered at the gate. It is usually changed only when the club decides to, and you have no say over who learns it. Using the same digits at home turns a widely shared number into the key to your house.
The same principle applies to any code you use elsewhere: the garage-door keypad, an alarm panel, a gym locker or a bank card PIN. Give the front door its own code, at least six digits long, and do not use a date or a sequence someone could guess. Most locks let each household member have a different code, which is better still, because the entry history then shows who came in.
We also never install, change or programme a club or marina gate on a member's request. Those systems belong to the club or the operator, and any change goes through them.
Can a smart padlock secure the boat trailer or the gear shed out back, and should it be on the same app as the house?
Smart padlocks, opened by a phone over Bluetooth or by a code on the body, work well on sheds, gear lockers and storage boxes, and some are made for outdoor use. A padlock on a trailer hitch takes more punishment from road spray and salt, and is a better job for a heavy, purpose-made hitch lock; we will tell you where the smart version makes sense and where a plain, solid lock is better.
Keeping the padlock in the same app as the house is convenient, but keep its credentials separate. Do not give the shed or the trailer the same code as the front door, and if a friend or a mechanic needs the shed for a weekend, give them a padlock-only code or a temporary phone key that cannot open the house.
Bear in mind that a padlock is only as strong as the hasp and the shed door it is fixed to. If a shed hasp is held on with short wood screws, the padlock is the strongest part of a weak arrangement, and we will suggest carriage bolts through the door.
The family house
We share custody, and the children's other parent collects them at our door — how should that parent's access be set up?
Start by deciding together whether the other parent needs to come inside at all. In many families the handover happens at the door, and the other parent needs no code. If they do need entry — to collect a child from a nap, or to wait inside on cold days — give them their own code, not a shared family one, and set it to work only on their days and hours. Most locks support recurring schedules, so a Wednesday-and-alternate-weekends pattern can be built in once.
Their code should not come with administrator rights, and they should not be the second administrator on the account. Keep the entry history in mind as well: it records when each code is used, which can be helpful but which both parents should know about in advance. If a court order or a written agreement deals with access to the home, follow it; a lock setting is not a substitute for that agreement.
Children's own codes should be separate from either parent's. If the arrangement changes, the other parent's code can be suspended or deleted from the app in seconds without anyone else's code changing.
Our toddler has worked out how to turn the thumb turn — how do we stop a small child walking out without trapping anyone in a fire?
This is one of the hardest balances at any front door, because the feature that lets a two-year-old out is the same one that lets everyone else out quickly in a fire. The city's building code expects exit doors to open from the inside without a key or special knowledge, and we will not fit a lock that needs a code, key or app to leave. So the answer is not to lock people in.
What works is a combination of measures that slow a small child but not an adult. A door-open alert or chime that sounds through the house the moment the door opens tells you at once; a door contact paired with the lock's app can do the same on your phone. A childproof cover over the thumb turn, or a secondary latch fitted high up out of a child's reach, adds a step that an adult can undo with one hand. Auto-lock also helps: if the door shuts behind a child, it relocks, and the history tells you exactly when it opened.
Talk to your paediatrician or a child-safety specialist about your particular child, and remove any high latch once the need has passed. Whatever you add, every adult in the house should be able to open the door in the dark in one or two movements.
Someone in our household is deaf — how will they know when the door has been unlocked or someone is standing at it?
A lock and a doorbell camera can both send events to places other than a ringing speaker. Most apps send notifications to a phone or a smartwatch, which vibrate, and a smartwatch on the wrist is often the most reliable signal in the house. Many smart-home systems can also flash a lamp or a coloured light when the doorbell is pressed, when the door unlocks or when it is left open, and a light in each main room means the signal is seen wherever the person is.
When we plan these, we check which events matter: a visitor at the door, a family member arriving, the door left unlocked at night, a wrong code entered repeatedly. Too many alerts and people stop noticing them; we set up the few that count. A video doorbell lets the person see who is there before deciding whether to open, which matters to everyone in a neighbourhood where a 2012 home invasion began with a knock and a false story.
If a household member uses a dedicated alerting system already, tell us at the walkthrough. Some can take a signal from a doorbell or smart-home hub directly, and we will check compatibility before recommending a lock.
Our dog has learned to open lever handles — will a smart lock stop him letting himself out?
Usually, yes, as long as the deadbolt is thrown. On most front doors the lever or handleset works only the latch, while the deadbolt is separate. A dog that pulls the lever retracts the latch, but if the deadbolt is out, the door stays shut. Setting auto-lock so the bolt throws a short time after the door closes means the deadbolt is out far more often than when people had to remember to turn a key.
There are two catches. Some handlesets and mortise locks have the deadbolt and latch linked, so pulling the inside lever retracts both — a safety feature for people that also lets a clever dog out. We check which type your door has. And a dog that learns to paw at the thumb turn can sometimes turn it, so we look at the shape of the inside unit as well.
Where a dog regularly tries the door, a round knob or a lever turned upward on an inside door can help, but on the main exit door we keep a hardware arrangement that every person in the house can open at once.
Is it worth it here?
Great Kills sits in one of the city's quietest precincts — is a smart lock still worth the money here?
Low crime is real here. A 2010 study ranked the 122nd and 123rd Precincts the two safest of 69 on per-capita crime, and crime across all categories in the 122nd fell 88 percent between 1990 and 2022. But the same precinct still recorded 91 burglaries in 2022, and the island-wide warnings in February 2026 show that patterns move from one neighbourhood to the next.
For most Great Kills households, though, the case for a smart lock is not mainly about burglars. It is about keys: the copies given to babysitters and relatives over the years that nobody can account for, the teenager who loses one every school year, the dog walker who moved away. A code can be deleted in seconds; a key can only be replaced by changing the lock. Auto-lock deals with the door left unlocked when the family rushes out for the express bus. The entry history settles arguments about who came home when.
If none of that applies — one or two people, keys always accounted for, no visitors who need to get in — a good mechanical deadbolt with a reinforced strike may be all you need, and we will say so. The lock should solve a problem you actually have.
