Order and orient the keys on your keychain
practicalbetterments.com
practicalbetterments.com
Is that so? My intuition is that it should depend on the side of the door the lock is mounted on. Most locks I have seen open by turning them away from the side where the latch is on, to move the bolt in the direction it is being turned, and that feels pretty natural to me. Isn't that the norm?
My apartment key opens 7 different locks, 1 of which opens clockwise, 5 counterclockwise, and 1 I don't know right now because it isn't actually mounted on a door and doesn't move a bolt.
Some don't, and it pisses me off every time.
• Get some small magnets. I used these 8 mm diameter 1mm thick disk magnets [1].
• Attach one to each key near the hole for the keyring. Orient the magnets so the each is attracted to the magnets on the neighboring keys.
When hanging on your keyring your keys will then form one unit which won't jangle.
You want magnets that are strong enough to attract through the keys. If yours need a little help you could try putting a magnet on each side of the key.
I held them on by wrapping some tape around the key.
I'm fairly meh about it, largely because I don't think it's good value. It was pretty hard for me to spend $60 on a keyring, and the knife is also fairly meh (I prefer locking+spring assisted opening knives for EDC). Also their "Key return service" is fairly meh; not really looking forward to another $4.99 service charge every year that I have to manage, when paying $60 for this thing.
Another company, KeySmart, has a similar device and it's more compact but doesn't do the "attachments" thing, so you'd carry a knife if you wanted that. They have one that has Tile finding device built in, as long as you remember to charge it. I had one for ~4 years with a Tile device attached to it, that had a dead battery for 90% of the time I had it.
I'd be tempted to get one of the smaller key organizers with an AirTag holder and set up a little magsafe charging setup that I could just drop my keys into.
I mostly don't lose my keys very often, but once in the last decade I dropped them while taking the kids around the neighborhood trick-or-treating and I don't want to repeat that experience, mostly because I keep a couple office keys on my ring.
Car keys don’t though, as far as I can remember.
Having a symmetrical key isn't something that I even care about but I suppose it's a bonus.
Having a symmetrical key isn't something that I even cared about but I suppose it's a bonus.
It was after a painful deadlock situation that we initially retro-fitted an electronic lock into the old front door which we carried over to the new door once we renovated the entire floor.
* If/When the battery dies, does the lock default to locked setting? I assume so, but how annoying would this be?
* Being a privacy nut, does the lock come with a pre-determined code, or can you generate your own? I assume you should be able to create your own, but figuried I'd ask.
Instead of answering my questions, if you have an online reference that you might have used to decide going this route, would be great if you could share. Thanks!
After that I replaced it with a plain old mechanical lock. Never again touching any smart home crap.
I'm sure I didn't use the wrong code three times, something must have happened the 2nd/3rd times like a key didn't get pressed hard enough to register. But regardless, the lesson is there's a bunch of possible failure scenarios you won't think of.
(There is no reason to give up on smart home devices as a category due to one badly designed device).
Typically, the home locks are just actuated mechanical locks. So the lock will stay in whatever state it was when the battery died. If you want to get into commercial-grade locks, there are magnetic locks that can be configured to fail open or close on power loss.
Anyway, the battery is not a big deal. I have a Kwikset lock with a ZigBee module, it runs on 4 AAA batteries. I switched to Li-ion rechargables several years ago, and they last for about 6 months between recharges with moderate door use. It's even longer if the lock is not used often.
And the lock starts beeping annoyingly after opening/closing when the batteries get down to 30%, giving you plenty of time to replace them.
> * Being a privacy nut, does the lock come with a pre-determined code, or can you generate your own?
You always can set your own combinations. And there are biometric locks.
It’s why I like the system from Ubiquiti, but it lacks certain features (Apple nfc keys) that make it not worth the cost for me.
It auto locks after each use but no confirmation the door was closed and secured correctly.
The Yale mentioned above will gladly auto-lock with the door still open and it will report as locked in the app. Not to bad if you know you closed the door but by just looking in the app someone might have left it open and it "locked" itself.
It will say it wouldn't lock, if say the door was partially closed and the bolt couldn't move.
I'm assuming another component needs to be in the door well to detect the bolt.
Anyone know any consumer level smart devices that do this?
I have a car, a father, and an office.
If I do upgrade, possibly use the system from Ubiquiti since I already have most of their equipment
Yes, always
>2. Order your keys clockwise based on the direction of entry.
Eh, I guess. Depends how many you have and what they're like. I have two nearly identical keys, and the rest (car, mail) require no time to find due to their size. In this scenario, I generally find that sorting keys by physical size makes the ring/carabiner feel more comfortable. That being said, I find the related suggestion to "Drill holes in your keys" <https://practicalbetterments.com/drill-holes-in-your-keys/> a more worthwhile solution to item 2.
All facing the same direction is just ... I mean ... if anyone here doesn't do that ... I don't even ... I gotta wash my hands ...
The downside to this is if your locks are cheapo pin tumbler locks then if an attacker steals the lock itself it is trivial for them to take your lock apart and reverse engineer a key that works in all your other locks (think crazy ex or wacko, rather than burglar.)
If you key your mailbox padlock and your front door alike and the wacko steals the padlock, they can take it home and figure out the code to your house.
My home has three entry points, one with a porch, and all four doors have keyed alike locks. It’s great!
It is left as an exercise to the imagination as to when it an attacker might find advantage in:
t_steal_mailbox +
t_decode_lock +
t_keyed_front_door_entry
t_pick_front_door
Seconded!
If you aren't up to rekeying locks yourself it is an easy job for a locksmith and shouldn't be too expensive.
If rekeying isn't sufficient because your locks use different shaped keys and so you'll have to get at least some new locks to put everything on a common key, and you are up to doing lock replacements yourself (which unless you've got unusual locks is usually one of the easiest DIY projects), I'd consider using Kwikset SmartKey for the new locks.
Despite what the name suggests these are not electronic locks. They are entirely mechanical, using a normal key. They came out in 2007 before "Smart" had become associated with shoving microprocessors into places they don't belong.
If you want to rekey a SmartKey lock you simply take the current key, insert it, rotate 90° clockwise, insert a tool Kwikset provides through a little hole in the front to press a button, and that releases the key so you can remove it without having to rotate the cylinder back to 0°. Then you can put in a different key, rotate the cylinder 180° counter-clockwise, then back to 0° and remove that key.
The lock is now rekeyed to that second key.
So, just buy your news locks from Home Depot or Lowe's without having to worry about getting locks that are keyed to the same key, install them, look at all the keys they came with and pick which one you want to be the common key, and then go around and rekey them all to that using the procedure described above.
Keep the other keys. They can be useful if you have a guest stay over (assuming you have more than one door to your house). Rekey one of the doors to one of those other keys and give that to the guest. When they leave you can rekey back to your common key.
Kwikset also makes SmartKey padlocks if you want to go all in on the one key thing.
There's a technical reason why "bitting up" (teeth up) should be the standard way to install pin tumbler locks. If the bitting faces up, the pins in the lock are directly above the bitting, and the springs are above the pins and not being compressed by the weight of the pins. If the lock is installed upside down such that the key goes in with bitting facing down, then the pins are sitting on top of the springs and may compress down over a period of years. A fatigued spring might not raise the pins to the shear line (the level needed for the lock cylinder to turn) and you'll be locked out.
It seems that most door installers and handymen don't follow any convention about up or down when installing locks.
The idea is to only have the keys I need for a particular journey.
I propose that the reason for clockwise ordering is: door locks are on the right, and also most people are right-handed. So looking at the keychain as you would hold it to insert the key into a lock, the first visible key is the first in clockwise order. The others are "stacked" beneath it.
If you need to find your keys to get out of your house, that's not ideal in an emergency. I think the author is talking about ingress, getting into one's home.
Car key is obvious.
Other keys are house front, house side, someone elses house (family).
Get some nail polish and paint the top of the house key, the one thay gets used 90% of the time.
Or you can get the coloured covers from key cutter shops but they do seem to break up eventually.
If you want to find a particular key fast, I doubt having them order helps.
I really like their simple point that some seconds are more valuable than others but that is in a different article.
I don't eternal utility with their ordering of keys, but I think it makes sense for a lot o them. And some people may never considered not having you their keys with the teeth all face in the same direction it just saves so much time and effort. I figure out how to hold one key and then I can just rotate till I get the one I need. I only have like five keys so I don't need any more organization
> "House, car, work scenario"
To provide some context know that I live in a place where I've never even seen a car key that is intended to be placed on a key chain and where all offices have access cards.
So my key chain has only the house key. My other keys, which I almost never use, hang in a key cabinet with labels. No unnecessary weight to carry around, no ordering and orientation problems, great for keeping track of which key goes where.
Hope that helps! :)
Home: biometric and/or combination locks.
No wallet either fwiw!
In daily/weekly use:
2 x Outer front door keys (shared with apartment above) - one Yale type, one deadbolt type 2 x Apartment front door keys- one Yale type, one deadbolt 1 x Bicycle storage key 2 x Bicycle lock keys
Monthly use is another 5 keys (2 more keys for other bicycle storage plus 2 more bicycle locks, shed door lock)
Even less frequently (but more than yearly) there are another 5 more keys that I’ll need to use.
Keyless would be great but it is pretty impossible right now.
Looking at my key ring I have keys oriented in the same direction and the similar looking keys have plastic “hats” that match the colour of the doors/locks they open.