You intentionally have codes that make it take longer to get out of your house in an emergency. Even with the keys by the door, it takes longer to use a key than to jsut turn a lever or two and leave. And, if you are just keeping your keys by the door, then the inside keyhole serves no purpose, if it ever did anyways.
And it is silly that you have to keep your doors less secure at night of all times due to the inconvenience of using a key. We can have our doors completely locked at night, and still get out easily (not that I tend to bother).
If a thief can get into your home, he can also get out. Unless the thief has a way to reach in and unlock the door, a lock like this is sufficient and far more convenient.
Oh, and lack of a way to get out of a building if the main exit is blocked is a far more important fire code consideration than structural integrity once you get past the basics. You are not going to stay in your house–the structural integrity only buys you time to get the fire out before collapse. Fire escapes are not the only thing you need, but nearly the barest necessity of fire safety, right after a way to put out a fire before it gets out of hand and an early detection system.
Finally, we have graded locks, too, you know. People who are worried about break-ins tend to get better locks. If Americans are more concerned about break-ins than Germans, that’s not the reason. A good lock is nowhere near a perfect solution, and some people weigh the risks and decide it isn’t worth it.
The problem for me isn’t that there’s a drawback exactly, it just wouldn’t really make a lot of sense considering other factors. My kids come and go throughout the day, so if I’m worried that someone will come into the house, shouldn’t I be more worried about them encountering this person? It seems if I’m locking the door, I should also not be letting them out without me - but that’s obviously crazy.
Heck - when it’s nice enough we leave the door actually open completely (there’s a screen to keep the bugs out), due to the frequency of kids coming in and out. Apparently I’m living life on the edge!
Similarly, we tend to keep a lot of windows open for the air. Someone who wanted in would be able to open a screen pretty easily. So if I were to take to locking my door 24x7, shouldn’t I shut all the windows, too? But there’s no way I’ll do that - we like having the windows open quite a bit.
We live in a DC and pretty much only lock the doors when we are out or when we go to bed. When we are home, we are pretty much in and out onto the front porch or our tiny backyard all day long. I’m not too worried, our neighbors are doing the same thing and everyone pretty much keeps an eye on each other.
When I was growing up, generally no. But now I keep them locked for the heck of it. If someone wants in bad enough they’ll just break a window. I do occasionally leave a door unlocked accidentally and I haven’t been murdered in my sleep yet.
As was mentioned, locks here come in all sorts of flavors. The locks on all my exterior doors are solid deadbolts that would require a battering ram to get through. You’d have to rip the doorframe clear off if you wanted to get in.
As far as I know, most burglars do not pick locks. Lock picking requires time, skill, and the right equipment. Most burglars, at least in this area, possess none of these. Perhaps your German burglars are just more serious about the craft. The burglar picking through a lock is mostly a Hollywood cliche. But if you live somewhere or need to protect assets which you feel a determined lock-picking thief will try to get at, you have many, many options for more secure locking devices. It’s not like 5-pin tumbler locks are the only thing on the market.
I am a locksmith (former) and I can tell you that ALL knobsets, no matter how they are graded by the US or Germany, are not the security you want to rely on, because practically anyone can kick in a typical 1/2" wedge latch, even a small child.
What keeps a door securely locked is a deadbolt with at least a 1" throw and a heavy duty strike plate secured to a solid frame with 3" screws. That extra-thick plate that comes with new deadbolts? That’s not an optional part.
Nobody picks locks, especially burglars for the reasons pulykamell listed above. Many, if not most locksmiths will only attempt to pick a lock either briefly before moving on to more reliable methods or in situations where they have no other choice. Lockpicking is a skill and an art, and even people who are really really good at it will often not be able to pick a lock for myriad reasons. I’ve personally (and seen others) open the highest-graded locks in a matter of seconds and yet been stymied by the cheapest POS Kwikset.
I can see how it would be annoying if it’s not what you’re used to, but I don’t have any desire to pop out for even two minutes with the door unlocked, and there aren’t many situations where I’d want to. When putting the rubbish down the internal chute, I put the door on the latch or use the extra lock at thre bottom to prop the door open, but you can tell from outside that it’s unlocked, so I wouldn’t do that normally.
I do. Not wide open, but you can tell it’s open. That’s just a normal English door. I tried hunting for a picture online, but couldn’t find a good one.
I just read this thread and felt like I had to put in my two cents.
Personal safety is not a matter of being used to anything. It’s a matter of prevention and risk reductions. And as others have previously stated, European doorlocks present a horrific safety hazard. I also moved to Germany and one of the first things realized where the dangers associated with door locks in private dwellings.
Let me clarify the issue by first depicting typical American German door locks:
This is a typical American deadbolt lock as viewed from the inside.
This is a typical German houselock as seen from the inside.
The German (European) locks make it possible to become locked inside a dwelling and not be able to exit in an emergency without a key full stop. This is a very dangerous and pointless standard to maintain in a country of over 80 million people. When we first moved to Germany my wife and I accidentally locked her sister and niece in our apartment not realizing that they would be locked in unable to escape in an emergency. They had helped us move in and we wanted to meet them somewhere but only realized that there was an issue after we came home wondering why they didn’t meet up with us! We then realized that we had locked them in!
A home is not intend to be a prison (barring home arrest) but in Germany just about every private home is a de facto jail cell.
The American locks can always be opened from the inside without a key under any circumstances. Building codes require that it be physically impossible to be locked inside one’s home. The German codes are quite dangerous and don’t even require that smoke alarms be installed in rental apartments.
A second problem with German (European) locks is that they “lock”, meaning that reentry is not possible without a key if a door is merely pulled closed perhaps by a strong draft. About the only places that such door locks exist in the US are in hotels where there is a 24 hour receptionist on duty. This is also extremely dangerous as children and elderly can easily be locked either in our out thus creating a completely otherwise preventable emergency situation. YES, I realize that it is possible to call a locksmith 24 hours a day, but there are problems with this assumption such as weather, time of day, night, access to a telephone and a hoard of other unforeseen issues that are 100% preventable by simply not allowing the door to lock unless it is deliberately locked upon leaving.
Another hazard in Germany are the locks that use keys inside dwellings.
I also realize that I am shouting into the wind because I have never been successful at trying to explain to a German why such locking mechanisms are dangerous.
No, you sound a bit on the alarmist side with such exaggerations. Aside from locking people in because you didn’t know about the type of lock, maybe your problem trying to explain it that the elderly or children don’t get locked into their homes often enough to be a real problem? I will try and ask a fireman I know, but I can’t recall ever hearing in the news that a fire went badly because somebody had locked themselves in. Yes, it is a theoretical danger, but that doesn’t mean it happens in real life.
Frankly, I prefer a good lock on the outside to sleeping with a gun under my bed because somebody could break in, as many Americans do.
constanze, you do realize that it is fully possible in America to get a top quality lock that won’t accidentally lock you inside or outside your home. Locks where you basically have to bash the door and doorframe to bits to get through the door without a key.
The sarcasm isn’t necessary. I wasn’t talking about German criminals being polite; but being not rock-stupid. If a criminal breaks in during the night when people are at home, he runs a high risk of getting caught; if he comes along during the day when people are at work (or at twilight in autumn, when it’s already dark but people aren’t home yet), then he runs almost no risk.
As for scaffolding allowing entrance through the windows: that is quite a different issue than door locks. Scaffolding attracts opportunistic thieves, as oppose to real break-in ones; that’s why the owner of the house is required to inform the insurance company whenever a scaffold is up because the risk increases, and why the company working on the scaffolding is supposed to secure it/ make access difficult at the end of each workday.
However, your account is a bit unclear: the criminal did attempt to break in through your window, but you deterred him - or he did break in, and you confronted him? Was it the window to the sleeping room, or an unused window (kitchen, bathroom)?
Then why do so many Americans rely on guns if the locks are that good? Are the roving gangs of criminals equipped with battering rams? Or is it another instance of misperception of real crime rate to media distortion?
My front doesn’t latch snugly, so I keep the deadbolt thrown most of the time. That said, I don’t lock the door behind me when I run to the laundry room or to get the mail.
Always, because I don’t believe in taking chances, but no big deal when I forget. (Twice in past 6 years.) Small town, low crime rate, although what crime we do have is mostly residential burglary.
A “good lock” should keep the bad guys out but never be a hindrance to escape in an emergency. Even in Europe cars are no longer built so that if a door becomes “locked” if it is not explicitly locked from the outside. The same concept used to apply to refrigerators in the past. Believe it or not, people (mostly children) actually used to die inside refrigerators due to to the locking mechanism that was only accessible from t he outside. i.e. it was impossible to kick a refrigerator door open from the inside. House locks that can be locked to prevent escape are designed with no more foresight than those booby-trapped refrigerators of the past.
Are you sured that refigerators doors were locked? I thought the reasons that kids become locked in old fridges when playing on junkyards was that the airtight seal and lack of a handle made the doors difficult to open from inside.
Of course, we avoid that problem by not throwing fridges on junkyards, but giving them to the waste resource center for proper disposal.
And house locks are not “designed to prevent escape”, they are designed the way the are because nobody has had a problem with it so far, apparently. If scores of confused elders or children regularly locked themselves in and then lost their keys, or people regularly died in fires because of locked doors, there surely would be a media uproar and call for change of law. Since there is neither, people seem to be smart enough to manage.
For instance, I can’t imagine kids locking themselves in because parents have the keys. Parents might lock the door from outside if leaving the kids for a short time to prevent kids from opening the door to strangers; or leave the door closed but unlocked (Generally, that would be only for a short trip). Latchkey kids have their own key, but are older and responsible enough to handle it.
Elder people if confused are not supposed to live alone, they are either put into homes with supervision or are given a caretaker.
Non-confused elders just continue their life-long habits of putting keys near the door - either a key-board or on the door handle - and keeping the door closed, but not locked while inside.
Therefore, this whole hysteria here about comparing homes to prisons is hard to grasp, because, while in theory the lock design is problematic, in practice it isn’t.
They most definetly used to. In that you could not open it from inside since it latched.
On those old refers, the proper thing to do is to remove the door.
My mom has locks that you have to use a key to open from the inside. Pretty standard deadbolt design. When she is home, she simply leaves the keys in the locks. If she’s going away, she can take the key out of the lock making it harder for someone to cart off your stuff. So in a way, those locks are designed to prevent escape.
I myself don’t bother with locking my house. For where I live, there really isn’t much point in it.
I clicked other - we lock them at night because it makes my son feel more comfortable (he doesn’t want the wolves to get in…which I think he picked up from a video game…) but also when we are gone for any extended period of time. More than 45 minutes is usually grounds for at least one lock. Out of town or multiple hours requires the deadbolt. We honestly never did until several people moved in to the neighborhood, and I know that sounds bad but they are involved in a lot of drug crap. We also keep the building locked at all times unless we are in it, since there is a lot of stuff in there that we’d prefer to keep. The previous owners didn’t even have a door on the building though, so I imagine they didn’t have a lot of trouble, but I figured it would be easier to show the insurance that someone busted the lock off and took XYZ than just to say that XYZ was missing…
