Minimum Recommendations:

Front  door

A BS3621 cylinder deadlocking nightlatch & a BS3621 mortice 5 lever lock. The nightlatch deadlocks from the inside with a key. Without this key it cannot be opened. Stop the thief smashing the window & reaching through to open the door. or reaching through the letterbox. Not all cylinder locks are the same. Some are very very good offering high resistance to picking, drilling, forcing, etc. Others are so very poor they can be opened with other keys or even a hairclip. 90% of front doors in this country have this type of lock fitted. Out of 100 doors we find that approx. 75% of these locks are very poorly fitted, very poor quality locks, badly worn or all of the above!

A 5 lever mortice beefs up your security considerably & also cannot be opened without a key. Most insurance companies recommend one of these as a minimum. For outward opening doors then hinge bolts are essential. Once the door is shut & locked the door could not be opened even if the hinges are cut off. Effectively locks the door into the frame when shut.

Back door

A BS3621 5 lever mortice lock. Why people put loads of locks on the front door & leave a puny 2 or 3 lever on the back door amazes us. The thief would take one look at the front & walk 10 yards further to the back door for an easy life! A 3 lever is woefully inadequate. No BS rating, not anti drill, not anti pick, no real strength at all. Very weak lock indeed & suitable only for internal doors but 7 out of 10 people still have them! Ex local authority houses are the usual. They fitted them because they were cheap. Again fit a set of hinge bolts to the door for higher security. Are you aware that all insurance companies recommend a minimum security level. If you do not have the correct grade locks fitted and are burgled then chances are there will be no insurance claim! We still come across doors that are secured with a 2 or 3 lever lock. Do you know that there are only a hand full of different keys for these locks? Chances are if you live in a road of approx. just 30 houses all fitted with these locks (Council estates for example) then the chances are very probable that someone else will have an identical key. Even more worrying a lot of the others will fit with a slight wiggle!  A 5 lever insurance lock guarantees at least 1000 key differs, sometimes a lot more & is a lot tougher to force.

You could also have 2 rack shoot bolts. These are similar to standard bolts but are fitted INTO the door as opposed to surface mounted which easily break if the door is kicked. Locking with a simple key & again relatively cheap. Can be fitted into any wooden door. Also consider a door chain. These come in a number of different formats from the simple chain to a push button release system. Especially suitable for the elderly.

We can also supply & fit anti-jemmy strips. Can be fitted to inward or outward opening doors. Once fitted & the door locked shut then these ingenious profiles interlock to form a solid steel barrier against crowbar attack. Acts as a draught excluder too!

All exit doors should have a BS 5 lever lock as an absolute minimum. BS rated locks are tested against drilling, picking & forcing. To obtain a BS rating they have to be tough. The new 2004 standard which was made mandatory on 1/1/2006 is even stronger. With longer locking bolt it is even more resistant to forced entry.

Above all the locks will only be as strong as the door. If it's a weak poorly fitted door then could be time to upgrade. We can supply & fit wooden front doors (as well as all internals too). Obviously they can be very expensive but not always. We have suppliers that supply a huge variety of wooden doors & of much higher quality than most DIY stores sell. DIY stores very often sell the same style but in a softer wood to make it cheaper.

Doors that are deadlocked without keys present are a real real pain to a thief. Example: A thief breaks in via an open (or closed) window. First thing he does is try all the exit doors as if he's disturbed he might need to get out using a different exit. Also he wants doors open because he doesn't want to struggle through windows with TV's, DVD players, etc. He needs a quick getaway. Therefore without keys he's in trouble. Never ever leave your keys in the locks, don't leave them in the draw or on a hook by the door. Also never leave them in locks at night. With the right knowledge a key could be turned from the outside opening the door. Some locksmiths recommend to leave them in for fire safety reasons. The choice is yours but we prefer not to.

UPVC doors can have multi locking points or simple latch designs. The real weak point of these doors is the lock itself. Companies that sell the doors on the fact that they have '10 point multi locking hooks' but supply them with a very poor lock are numerous. Many many don't even have the correct lock fitted at all! Again ex local authority houses are the usual suspects in our experience. These locks if of poor quality or incorrectly fitted can be easily broken into. We won't go into details here for security reasons but they can be very very easy to bypass. These locks are unlike mortice locks in the fact that they can so easily be fitted incorrectly. A mortice lock that has been fitted poorly could still be difficult to break into. The UPVC locks are far easier.

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