Residential · Greater Manchester · 24/7
Your house has five doors. Four of them get ignored.
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Everybody thinks about the front door. Nobody thinks about the other four, and the other four are where people get in. Here is what is actually wrong with each of them in a typical Manchester house.
1. The front door
The one you look at every day and the one that gets the money. If it is uPVC or composite, the thing that will fail is the multipoint gearbox, and it will warn you for weeks by getting stiff. If it is timber, the thing that matters is whether the mortice is BS3621, because your insurer probably asked and you probably did not look.
2. The back door: where they actually try
This is the important paragraph on this page.
Your back door faces a garden nobody overlooks. It has a fence around it. Somebody working on it has all the time and privacy they want, which the front door does not offer. And in most Manchester houses it still has whatever lock was fitted in 1974, because the front got upgraded and the back did not.
Most home policies say all external doors, not final exit door. If yours does and your back door is a 2-lever, you are not covered and you will find out at claim time. £85-140 fitted. See insurance work.
3. The side door and the garage
Often the same problem twice: a door nobody uses, so nobody notices it has seized, dropped, or that the lock was never any good. A garage that connects to the house is an external door wearing a disguise, and it is frequently the weakest thing on the property. Garage locks.
4. The patio or french doors
Big, glazed, at the back, and usually on a multipoint run that is longer and heavier than the front door's. They drop sooner and they bind harder. If yours needs a shove, that is the same £45-85 warning the front door gives.
5. The windows nobody locks
Most policies want key-operated locks on accessible windows: ground floor, and anything reachable from a flat roof, a bin store or a drainpipe. In Victorian and Edwardian Manchester that means sash windows, which frequently have nothing but an original catch a screwdriver defeats in seconds.
What we do for houses
Locked out
Non-destructive wherever possible. £65-110
Lock repair
Repair before replace. £25-45
Lock change
Moved in, split up, lost keys. £35-60
Security upgrade
What your insurer actually wants. £65-140
Key cutting
Including what shops cannot do. £8-55
Lock survey
Written report, all five doors. £45-75
The thing worth doing this year
Go and look at your back door. Open it, look at the edge, find the faceplate. Is there a Kitemark and the number BS3621 stamped on it? If not, and your policy says all external doors, that is a £85-140 problem you did not know you had, and it is the cheapest thing on this page relative to what it prevents.
It costs nothing to look.
Questions people actually ask
Which door in my house is the weakest?
The back door, almost always, and it is the one people never spend money on. It faces a garden nobody overlooks, it has a fence around it giving privacy, and in most Manchester houses it still has whatever lock was fitted decades ago, because the front got upgraded and the back did not. Somebody working on your back door has time and cover that they simply do not have at the front. Go and look at yours: if the faceplate does not have a Kitemark and BS3621 stamped on it, that is your weak point.
Do I need BS3621 on my back door as well as the front?
Read your policy, because a lot of them say all external doors rather than final exit door, and this is the single most common gap we find in Manchester homes. People upgrade the front because that is the one they think about, and the insurer's wording covers the back, the side and sometimes the garage door too. If yours says all external doors and your back door is a 2-lever mortice from the seventies, you are not covered. A BS3621 5-lever is £85 to £140 fitted.
How much does a residential locksmith cost in Manchester?
Most home jobs fall between £25 and £120. A lock service is £25 to £45, a euro cylinder £35 to £60, a mortice service £40 to £70, a uPVC gearbox £60 to £120, and a lockout opened without damage £65 to £110. A BS3621 upgrade is £85 to £140 per door. There is no call-out fee, the price is fixed before we start, and it does not change at night, at weekends or on bank holidays.
What about my windows?
Most home policies require key-operated locks on accessible windows, meaning the ground floor and anything reachable from a flat roof, a bin store or a drainpipe. In Manchester's Victorian and Edwardian housing that usually means sash windows, which very often have nothing but an original fitch catch that opens with a flat screwdriver through the gap between the sashes in about four seconds. Sash stops and key-operated bolts fit to the original timber at £25 to £55 per window, so you do not have to replace beautiful windows to comply.
Is my garage door a security risk?
If it connects to the house, yes, and it is one of the most overlooked things on a property. An integral garage door is an external door wearing a disguise: people treat it as an internal door, fit whatever was cheapest, and never look at it again. It is frequently the weakest point on the whole house. If your garage has a door into the hall or the kitchen, that door needs treating like a front door, and the garage's own up-and-over or side door needs a lock somebody would actually notice.