![]() Then again, even if the door unlocks a second time, it’s not that big a deal. ![]() ![]() The software really should be smarter than that. It seems like the lock recognizes one of us first, unlocks the door, and a few moments later (after we’ve come inside) detects the second person’s phone and thinks they’re separately returning home. One quirk I’ve noticed is that when my wife and I both return home together, we’ll often enter the house and lock the door behind us, only to have the door unlock a moment later. It’s still better than getting out my keys and unlocking the door-especially if you drive a car with a keyless ignition, because you won’t have your keys in your hands. That happens to me probably a majority of the time, but other times I’ll stand at the door for a couple of seconds before it opens. In theory this is a magical process that makes your front door unlock for you as you walk up to it. Once you leave the vicinity and then return, the lock looks for the presence of your iPhone via Bluetooth, and the moment it sees it, it unlocks the door. In order to avoid unlocking my front door every time I walk past it, the auto-unlock system uses your iPhone’s location services to pay attention to when you leave the immediate area around your house. So the Yale lock cleverly takes advantage of Bluetooth LE to automatically unlock the door when I return home. I was able to configure the lock via the August app on my iPhone, generating a guest code to give to my mother when she visited us.īut entering in a multi-digit code to get in your front door is hardly the 21st-century convenience I’m looking for. On its own, you can unlock your door by entering a number on the touchscreen, whether you have a phone or not. In the end I rebooted the lock (rebooting my front door lock is apparently something I can do now) and everything started working fine. I spent an extra 30 minutes trying to find the ideal place for the adapter, as my closest outlet to the door didn’t seem to be picking up its Bluetooth signal. ![]() To attach it to a local network for HomeKit and Alexa integration, you need to add an extra piece-the August Connect adapter, which plugs into an electrical outlet and needs to be positioned within Bluetooth range of the lock as well as in range of your home Wi-Fi network. Out of the box, the lock works using Bluetooth LE. It’s bigger than what was there before, but isn’t overwhelming. On the inside of the door, there’s now a small box attached to the door with a manual deadbolt control (i.e., you turn it and the lock slides open or closed) at the bottom. Gone was the old traditional key lock above my door latch on the outside instead, there’s now a black glass keypad. The smart lock has more lock hardware, but it’s not ridiculously large. I did the replacement in less than half an hour, using nothing more than a screwdriver. (It’s also the current Wirecutter pick.) It was an easy swap-out replacement for my existing deadbolt. The lock I bought is the $300 Yale Assure SL YRD256, which works with HomeKit and other smart-home tech via the bundled Connected by August module and gateway. That backstop saved us from a lot of second-guessing.) (Our previous door had a deadbolt and a knob that you could set to lock when closed. My front door has a deadbolt and a separate door latch-one that doesn’t lock, which means every time we’ve come and gone since we got the door six years ago, we’ve had to manually lock the deadbolt. By the time we got home, I’d ordered one. I’d been skeptical about replacing our front-door deadbolt with an Internet-connected gadget since I’d first heard of the Smart Lock category a few years ago, but in that moment I saw the perfect use case. The moment we were headed down the freeway toward the Golden Gate Bridge and began to wonder if we’d remembered to lock our front door, I resolved to buy a Smart Lock. This house is accessed by keypad (or iPhone) now. Yale Assure SL review, or: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace the Smart Lock
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