Universal default passwords were common enough in consumer devices that two governments legislated against them. For a connected lock, the account layer and the leftover programming codes deserve as much attention as the hardware.
Lock obligations in rental housing come from habitability doctrine, specific state statutes, and lease terms, and they vary enormously by state. Here is how the pieces generally fit together and where to get an answer for your jurisdiction.
Grade 1 is not a marketing adjective. It is the top tier of a graded test battery covering cycles, strength, security, materials, and finish, and knowing what each category measures changes how you shop.
Most smart lock failures trace back to installation, not electronics. Alignment, tailpiece fit, mounting torque, and network placement decide whether the motor lasts years or burns through batteries in weeks.
Passage, privacy, office, storeroom, classroom: these are defined behaviors with standardized designations, not marketing labels. Understanding what each one does lets you pick hardware from a description of how a room is actually used.
A full door and frame replacement is expensive and often unnecessary. Assessed and sequenced properly, most of the available improvement on an existing opening comes from inexpensive work on the frame side.
Delayed egress and controlled egress are narrow code exceptions that let a door resist immediate exit under tightly defined conditions. Understanding what those conditions are explains why so many installed systems do not qualify.
Bumping is a real property of ordinary pin tumbler cylinders, not a myth and not a crisis. Here is the concept at a level that helps you evaluate a product claim, and how to verify bump resistance rather than take a package’s word for it.
A knob asks the hand to grip and rotate; a lever asks only for downward pressure. That difference drives accessibility rules, egress logic, and whether a door still works when your hands are full.
Every move out leaves an unknown number of keys in circulation. Here is how rekeying at turnover actually works, what state law tends to address, and which hardware choices make the job fast enough to do every single time.
