Keyless Entry

Keyless entry is when someone doesn't need a traditional key to open a door, instead the key is replaced with a number pad and/or electronic sensor and some kind of RFID tag.

Problem with Traditional Keys

At the Salt Lake City Bicycle Collective we had a proliferation of keys to our shop, mostly legitimate, some not. This was mainly the result of not having a solidified volunteer structure and a laxed key policy for who had access to the shop. The issue was that every time a volunteer would copy, lose, move, or go MIA -- there would be an unaccounted master key to our shop floating around.

Possible Solutions

Re-key the Door

To re-key the door and provide copies to all the legitimate people on the key list would cost around $100 and $3 per key. We could do this, but there we didn't want to do it again.

Re-key the Door with a Special Key

Most Locksmith shops have a proprietary system that in theory only they can make copies of. They keep a list of authorized people from your organization, so when someone comes to make a copy, they have to present photo ID before they get a copy. This was around $200 and $7 per key. However we still had the lost key problem.

Number Pad Keyless Entry =

We considered using a number pad, but in today's world of fast cell phone texting that didn't seem like a good idea at all.