I’ve been getting a lot of questions about installing digital keypad locks on people’s front doors. Schlage and Kwikset are offering a number of increasingly affordable options for keypad-operated levers and deadbolts. I have mixed thoughts about them.

On the one hand, they’re awesome! They light up, they chirp, and they add digitization into yet another aspect of our lives. Some of them link into smart home systems and can be remotely programmed to provide and deny access to incidental visitors. Instead of giving a cleaner or short-term house guest a key that can be secretly duplicated, you can give out an entry code and delete it whenever you want. And they allow you to go without a key. Maybe it doesn’t seem like a big deal to have a ring of keys in your pocket, but there will likely come a day when people will think it strange and backwards that we all carried these jangly bunches of metal around with us at all times. If the world is going to start moving toward fancy computer locks, Redmond, WA is an appropriate place for that trend to take off.

From a security standpoint, many of these locks are pretty solid. Most of the Schlage models meet ANSI Grade 1 standards. I personally don’t know an easy way to bypass the keypad yet; if I want to get through one of these I have to pick the lock cylinder. But it’s not hard to imagine that someone will figure out a way to do it, and then it will be necessary to rethink the way these locks are designed. That’s true of mechanical locks as well.

I do have some reservations about these new locks. Most of them are battery-operated, and batteries fail. They usually give you a warning that the battery is dying. But changing the batteries on a deadbolt is the kind of thing that many of us tend to put off until it’s too late. If the lock also works with a key (that you happen to have access to when you really need it), then you’re fine. Otherwise you may be locked out when the batteries finally give out. I recommend against getting a lock that takes no key at all.

Installation is supposed to be pretty easy, as you can supposedly replace your old lock with the new one without boring any new holes. The thing is that it’s extremely common for a deadbolt’s throw to be poorly aligned with its strike, which means that you have to push or pull the door a little to get it into position before you can operate the lock. That’s easy enough for you to do, but try getting your digital lock’s four AA-batteries to push the door into place so it can engage or disengage the throw. It’s impossible. These locks don’t leave any room for error in installation. And with the way our doors swell during these wet Seattle winters, a lock that’s installed perfectly in the summer might start to malfunction a few months later. Though this is fixed easily enough, the point is that it’s not always as plug-and-play as it suggests on the box. But when was it ever?

My biggest qualm with these locks is that they introduce a new expense into our lives. You can get a good lock for $30, which, if installed correctly, will last for thirty years. I don’t have any evidence to support this yet, but I just can’t help doubting the longevity of a piece of electronics that’s mounted to the outside of a door in a famously wet climate. I predict that these locks will start to go bad after 7 to 10 years. So instead of the deadbolt costing $1 per annum, you might be dividing the cost of a $120- or $180-deadbolt over a much shorter stretch, and finding that your deadbolt expense is now ten or twenty times what it used to be. Also, you might end up spending more of your life servicing, replacing, and thinking about home security hardware than you ever needed to before.

Take these complaints with a grain of salt, as they’re coming from a guy who’s spendthrift, averse to change, and late to adopt new technologies. If you want to buy one of these locks, go with Schlage instead of Kwikset, and avoid the knockoff brands. Try installing it yourself. If you run into trouble, give me a call. I promise not to grumble.