Keypad or card reader has stopped working

First, find the mechanical override. Almost every access controlled door has a key cylinder or a manual release fitted for exactly this situation. On a fail-secure lock the door stays locked when power is lost, so that key is how people get in until the system is working again.

Then check that people can get out. On a correctly installed door, exit is mechanical and independent of power: a lever, a push bar, something that works with a hand. If leaving the space requires the reader to function, that is a serious fault in its own right and worth raising immediately.

Work out how far the problem spreads

Before assuming the reader has failed, check whether other doors on the same system are affected. It is the fastest diagnostic available and it changes who needs to attend.

• One door only. Likely the reader, the strike, the door hardware or the wiring to that opening.
• Several doors. Likely a controller, a power supply or a network link, and the doors are reporting a problem upstream of them.
• One credential only, on every door. Not a hardware fault at all. That is a revoked, expired or damaged card.

What it usually turns out to be

Power. A tripped supply, a failed transformer or a battery that has reached the end. A reader with no lights is almost always a power question rather than a reader question.

The strike, not the reader. The reader beeps and the light goes green and the door does not open. The fault is at the lock end: an electric strike that has failed, jammed, or is binding because the door has dropped and the bolt is under pressure.

The credential database. Nobody has revoked a leaver in months and then somebody does a tidy-up. Worth checking before anyone is dispatched.

Physical damage. Readers on exterior doors take weather and impact. On coastal property salt gets into the housing and the electronics behind it.

Getting through the next day

If the repair cannot happen immediately, the honest options are the mechanical key on a controlled issue, a member of staff on the door, or putting that opening on a keypad temporarily so a code can be shared and changed afterward.

Do not prop the door. A propped access controlled door is an open building and it usually stays propped long after the reason has gone.

How long you can run on the override

A mechanical key on a controlled issue is a reasonable answer for a day or two. Past that it stops being a workaround and becomes an access system nobody is tracking, because keys get lent, copied and not returned in exactly the way the reader existed to prevent.

Call right away if the door is a perimeter entrance, if it is the only controlled route into an area holding stock, records or controlled items, or if you have had a departure recently and the reader was how that person's access was revoked.

It can wait if the door is internal, the override is issued to named people, and the space behind it is inside a secured building. Either way, note who holds the override key and when it goes out, because that record is the thing that gets skipped and then matters.

Write down what the reader was doing when it stopped. A unit that went dark all at once points somewhere different from one that has been reading intermittently for two weeks, and the intermittent case is the one people leave alone because it still mostly works. Intermittent readers rarely recover on their own.

If the site has several readers on one controller, note whether the others still work and whether the controller itself shows power. That single observation is frequently the difference between a visit that replaces a reader and a visit that finds a failed power supply feeding six doors.

Which half we do

We fit, rehang and maintain reader hardware, keypads, electric strikes as hardware, door hardware and mechanical locks, and we change codes and credentials. None of that requires a Florida contractor license and it is performed by TrionX employees.

Wiring, power supplies, running cable and anything tying into a panel is electrical work under Florida law at any job size, with no exception for small jobs. A licensed electrician carries that out and we coordinate it, so the hardware and the power are scoped together rather than leaving you managing two vendors on one door.