Do I need a locksmith or a door company?

Open the door, hold it standing open, and work the lock. If the bolt or the latch throws smoothly in mid-air, the lock is working and the problem is the door, the frame or the strike. If it binds with nothing in its way, the fault is inside the lock.

That takes ten seconds and it is the single most useful thing you can establish before booking anybody.

Signs it is the door

The key turns but the bolt will not fully throw when the door is closed. You have to lift, pull or lean on the door to lock it. The latch catches on the edge of the strike rather than entering it cleanly. There is a visible gap at the top or the bottom of the door that was not there last year.

All of these are alignment. A door drops on its hinges over time, a frame moves, a closer loses its adjustment, and the hardware ends up fighting a few millimeters it was never designed to cover. Our article on commercial door alignment covers what actually moves and in what order it gets corrected.

Signs it is the lock

The key is stiff or catches at the same point every time, regardless of whether the door is open or closed. The cylinder turns but nothing happens. The handle has gone loose or has stopped returning. A keypad or reader has stopped responding while the mechanical side of the door is unchanged.

Wear inside a cylinder, a broken spring, a failed cam and a worn key are all genuine lock faults, and they are fixed by working on the lock.

Why it is often both

Here is the pattern that produces two visits and two invoices. A door drops slightly. The latch starts catching. People pull the door harder to make it lock. The extra force wears the cylinder and the latch faster than normal use ever would. Eventually the lock fails, so a locksmith is called and fits a new one.

The new lock works for a while, because it is new. Then the same misaligned door wears it the same way, and the fault comes back within a year looking exactly like a lock problem again.

Look at the door before deciding on the lock. The door open test is worth doing yourself.

What to check before you call anybody

Whether it affects one door or several. Several doors going the same way at once points at the building rather than the hardware, and building pressure is the usual culprit.

Whether anything changed. A new closer, a new floor covering, a door that has been forced, a frame that has been knocked by a cart. Recent work on a door explains a surprising number of faults.

Whether the strike plate shows a bright wear mark above or below the latch opening. That mark is the door telling you exactly how far out of position it is, and it saves a technician the diagnosis.

Whether the lock has been changed before, and by whom. A cylinder that does not match the others in the building, or a strike that has been enlarged with a file, tells you somebody has already worked around this rather than corrected it. Both are worth mentioning on the call, because they change what a technician expects to find behind the plate.

Who is allowed to do it

Locks, access control and door hardware are performed directly by our own technicians. None of it requires a Florida contractor license, which is why it can be handled in-house rather than passed on. TrionX carries general liability and workers' compensation on that work.

Anything on the electrical side of a powered door or an electrified lock is different. The supply, the control wiring and any fault traced back to a circuit are coordinated through licensed contractors, because Florida requires a license for electrical work at any job size.

When it cannot wait

A door on the perimeter that will not lock does not wait, whichever half turns out to be the cause. Neither does an exit device that will not release, because that is a life safety failure rather than a security one.

A door that is stiff, noisy, or needs a shoulder can be scheduled, and it is worth scheduling rather than living with. A door that needs force is wearing a lock down, and the repair gets more expensive the longer it goes on.