Everyone needs to find the best way to secure a door because they are likely to be the most important part of your home’s security. There are many things to consider about your door’s security, including how you use it, how many other people use it, and the amount of risk the property is currently facing. If you are looking for better security while living alone, you may feel more vulnerable to burglary because so few people visit the home. But if you live with a large group of people, access control and convenience may need to be balanced with new security. Regardless of your situation, your doors play a tremendous role in your home security.
Top Door Security Worries
One of the most important parts of finding the best way to secure a door is knowing the risks you hope to avoid. You should complete a home security risk assessment to get a sense of your current level of protection, as well as anticipate the types of threats your home may be most vulnerable to. If you do not put forth the effort to determine the specifics of your security needs, then you are among the many people who don’t care about security. Please do not make a change without knowing why you are making it. This will prevent you from expending unnecessary effort and make you feel what you are doing matters. Here are the main things you should consider when looking for the best way to secure a door.
Kicking/Ramming – One of the most popular types of forced entry is kicking or ramming attacks. These are brute force methods that anyone can use, with their feet, a battering ram, or a shoulder strike. This type of force will likely compromise the siding of the door and rip the strike plate off of the doorframe. The hinges can also be compromised by battering rams. Kicks can also break the door itself if the door is weaker than the hinges and the strike. The best way to secure a door must include some way to thwart these types of attacks, as they are the most likely threat any door will face.
Bypassing – To bypass a secure door means that there is a flaw, which allows you to open the door without applying much force at all. Think of a bypass as methods that out-think the security—for example, moving a tool into the gap at the bottom of a door to actuate the lock from the inside. The most popular example of bypassing doors is the credit card method and its also necessary to know how to prevent credit card door entry. This has more to do with how the door lock is used than anything else. Even if you have found the best way to secure a door, you can undercut the security by only using the spring-loaded latch bolt on the lock handle.
Drilling – There are several ways that a criminal might choose to attack a lock, but drilling is the most universally effective and only requires a tool that is readily available to most people. They will either drill the core, if they have no experience working with locks, or perhaps they will more deftly attack standard drill points. The most advanced criminal will know the drill points for your specific lock, but that level of expertise is extremely rare. More than likely, the sound of these attacks is obscured, so they are less apparent, but if the lock is too hard to drill, the prevailing grinding sound of metal on metal is likely to attract some attention.
Cutting – Most cutting attacks are focused on the throw of the deadbolt. This is the length of metal that your lock extends into the strike plate. On the cheap locks that you will find at hardware stores, cutting can be done extremely fast, even with just a hand saw. The success of this attack depends on the metal content of your lock’s bolt and the gap between the door and the frame. An extremely tight gap and a hardened metal throw will be what you need to deflect this type of attack.
Picking – Lock picking is an unpopular method for criminals to use, but it is still important to consider your lock’s pick resistance. You cannot talk about the best way to secure a door without considering the vulnerability to the most widely discussed form of covert entry. All locks can be picked, hypothetically speaking, but there are locks out there that are extremely difficult to pick open or locks that have not been picked yet. It is incredibly hard to tell when your door has been picked open. You are likely to need a forensic locksmith if you do not already know that your lock is nigh unpickable.
Bumping – more common than picking, criminals will use bump keys, which require less craft and experience to use effectively. The best way to secure a door and protect a door from lock bumping requires knowledge of how lock bumping works. Essentially, a standard pin tumbler key is cut so that every groove is at its maximum depth. This requires the bump key to be made for your particular lock (which it likely will be, unless you have a lock with a high-security lock with a restricted keyway).