Smart lock locks smartly

When we were robbed a few months ago, we were left with two possible stories for how the burglar got in - we came home to find both a window and door unlocked. Since we are pretty convinced the window was locked from the inside, our suspicion is that this happened on one of the rare unlucky days that one of us left the house without locking the front door. It happens once every few months. We needed to take steps to make sure that couldn't happen any more, rare though it was.

And so, despite the relatively new keyless lock already installed on our front door, we decided to upgrade. Our first keyless lock had no motor - we had to manually turn the deadbolt. We selected it for that feature. Fewer moving parts meant less to break and longer battery life. Now however, we wanted something that would automatically lock if we forgot.

Schlage's touchscreen model will do that, and will sync with a home wireless hub, if we eventually decide to further turn our home into something out of the Jetsons (yay internet of things).

Not too many parts - by now we are pros at installing locks:

It also helped that the manual was very easy to understand, even providing "actual size" pictures of the parts to help distinguish between the various screws and bolts:

The outside number panel is smaller than our old one, which we had to install before the previous paint job on the door had fully set (because, you know, we needed to be able to lock the door) so it was time to pull out the paint:

I can still see the vague outlines of the old model about an inch below the new one, but I don't think it bothers me enough to get out the sand paper and really even it out. It's practically invisible in this picture:

Inside, the opposite is true. The new lock takes up much more space than the old one, because of the motor. Here's the old - a simple toggle:

 Then the new one, with the wire coming out, halfway through the installation:

 And finally, the finished look:

Not really thrilled about how it looks, but it works. We activated the option auto-lock feature, will turns the bolt after 30 seconds. As we expected we would, sometimes now we try to close the door after the deadbolt has been extended, i.e. if the door is open for more than 30 seconds. I'm sure we're going to create a nice gash in the wood trim until we get used to it. But it's worth it for the peace of mind knowing that the door is locked when we're away from home. We've also set an additional safety features by creating longer entry codes, to make it harder for someone trying to guess. As before, we have a few different codes that use all the numbers on the keypad, to prevent someone from being able to guess based on wear/finger prints over only a few digits. Anything to make our house less appealing as a target.

Some new wireless hubs are expected out later this year, better than the current models, so soon we might even be able to check our home's status on the internet.