Smart Lock Installation in Martinez
$185 to $459. A keypad on a door older than the standard it was made for. Electronics cannot shove a sticking leaf, so paint comes out of the rabbet and the keeper is moved to meet the bolt before the carton is opened. The codes are yours and you type them in yourself. The override blank is cut at the van the same afternoon.
$185–$459
Typical price
18 min
Avg. arrival
24/7
Availability
People arrive at this page wanting the same thing everybody wants. A code for the cleaner, a code for the kids, an end to hiding a key under a pot on the porch. That is a reasonable thing to want and it is entirely achievable on an old Martinez door. What it is not is a thirty-minute job out of a carton, and the reason has nothing to do with which brand is in the box.
Here is what the packaging assumes. An inch bore into the edge, two and one eighth inches through the face, a backset of either two and three eighths or two and three quarters, and a leaf hanging square in a frame that has stopped moving. A downtown or Alhambra Heights door answers almost none of that. It was prepared for a mortise case, so the edge carries a rectangular pocket and the face carries no bore at all. Its thickness is whatever the mill sent. And the frame around it has been repainted every few years since it went up.
Paint is the part nobody warns you about, and in this town it decides more installations than hardware does. Coats build on the stop, in the strike pocket and along the jamb, and a bolt that used to travel freely now scrapes through the last quarter inch of its throw. A hand never notices, because a hand simply pushes harder. A motor has no shoulder to lean on. It stalls, tries again, flattens the cells over a fortnight and finally reports a jam, and six weeks later the lock is in a drawer with the brand taking the blame. The brand was rarely the problem. The paint was.
So the door is dealt with first and the lock goes on afterward, in the same visit. In practice that is some combination of the following. The stop and the strike pocket are scraped back to clean wood so the bolt runs its full throw with nothing dragging. The strike is moved and its pocket recut to wherever the bolt actually arrives, and a box strike goes in on three-inch screws. Hinges are shimmed or the top corner of the leaf eased where a century has let it drop. And on a mortise door the route gets chosen out loud between three: a retrofit unit that sits over the existing thumbturn and leaves the bronze case entirely alone, a smart lock made in mortise format that goes into the pocket already cut, or filling that pocket, letting in new stock and boring the leaf for a standard bolt. The first is the cheapest and the least disruptive. The third is carpentry and it is priced as carpentry.
That is also the honest account of why the range is as wide as it is. Installation runs $185 to $459 with the $89 call-out inside it, and hardly any of that spread is about the hardware sitting in the box. A door out in Morello Park with the bore already at size, a leaf hanging true and a strike where it belongs is the $199 end and it is a short visit. A downtown leaf with a mortise pocket, a stop carrying a hundred coats and a strike that has not lined up since the seventies is the $459 end, and that is a couple of hours of scraping, chiseling and fitting followed by a lock. Identical boxes off the same shelf can land at opposite ends of that four blocks apart, and it is the door that puts them there.
Whatever the model, one condition is worth holding to: the door keeps a working keyway. Batteries go flat on the least convenient morning there is, and a door with no mechanical way in is simply a lockout that has not been booked yet. Where the lock keeps a cylinder, it is pinned to the key already on your ring and a metal key is cut at the van the same day. Setup runs with you present. The app installs on your phone and not the technician's, the first codes are typed by you, and you add one and delete one with somebody who knows the menus standing beside you. No door this shop has fitted has left with the installer default still on it. Ninety days on the labor.
The order of the day holds here the way it does everywhere on this site. Describe the edge of the door, because a mortise pocket and a round bore are two different afternoons. Hear the figure with the hour already inside it. Then the paint comes off, the strike goes where the bolt lands, and the lock goes on.
Sixteen jobs, fourteen of them with a range and two quoted once the openings have been counted on site. What moves a figure inside its range here is what is actually in the door: a cast mortise case that comes apart, cleans up and goes back in takes the low end, while a case seized with a century of paint, or one that has to be replaced because a part inside it is broken beyond repair, takes the high one. Say what the key does when you turn it, and the range closes to a single number on the call.
- Daytime (7am–8pm)standard rates
- Evening (8pm–12am)+$45
- Overnight (12am–7am)+$85
FAQ
Smart Lock Installation: quick answers
The lock is already on its way from an online order. Will it fit our door?+
Photograph the edge of the leaf with the door open and send it before the box arrives. If that edge shows a rectangular plate and a pocket, the door was made for a mortise case and a standard bolt will not simply drop in. There is usually still a route, most often a retrofit unit over the thumbturn, and you hear which one applies and why rather than finding out with the old lock off.
There is nearly three hundred dollars between the ends of that range. What accounts for it?+
The door, essentially all of it. A newer leaf with the bore at size and the strike lined up is the low end and under an hour of work. A downtown leaf with a mortise pocket, a stop thick with paint and a strike three millimeters out needs scraping, chiseling and refitting before a lock can sit flat, and that is the high end. Same hardware, opposite ends, four blocks apart.
It jams every few days and we are on our third set of cells. Bad unit?+
Almost certainly not. That is precisely what a bolt dragging at the end of its travel looks like, and on these doors the drag is paint far more often than metal. A hand pushes through without registering it. A motor cannot, so it retries, stalls and empties the batteries. What gets fixed is the stop, the strike and the way the leaf hangs, and all three are checked before a figure is given.
The cells will go flat eventually. What happens that morning?+
Nothing much, provided the door kept a keyway and the key exists. That is why a cylinder stays wherever the model has one, pinned to the key you already carry, and why the day the lock goes on is also the day a metal key gets filed for it. Store that key anywhere except the ring you carry around. Nearly every keypad call in this town comes from a house where it was never made in the first place.
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Open 24 hours, 7 days
Say whether the key meets a keyhole or a cylinder, and the rest of the call is quick
Martinez and the towns around the strait, around the clock. What sits in the edge of the leaf decides the work and the work decides the number, which is settled on the phone with the $89 visit and any late hour already inside it. It reads the same on the receipt. Ninety days on the labor, a rebuilt bronze case covered the same as a new lock.