As a security professional / locksmith / general “make this place be locked” guy, there are a few ways that you can disable the ingress/egress points of a building. This information is good to avoid issues with your doors on your business!
There are two general types of ways you can screw with a door: either the door cannot lock, or the door cannot open.
If you use any sort of badge/keyfob/rfid nonsense to enter a building, the door is either locked by a powered lockset, an electric strike, or a maglock. Here’s how you tell.
This is a maglock! If there is a little rectangle in the door frame, this is what it is. This takes 12 or 24 volts of power, rather low amperage, and by fire code there must be a DIRECT INTERRUPT to force these locks to open on the inside of the door. It may look like this:
If this button were to be held down in some way, or if the (likely to be) green and white wires behind this thing were cut and twisted together, the door would remain open. There are also frequently little access doors on these locks where the power wires connect:
If there’s no door, look for access to the wire inside of a box near the door frame as they can just have a wire that comes off of them:
Unlike other locking devices, maglocks NEED CONSTANT POWER TO OPERATE, also known as being “fail safe” opposed to “fail secure”. Fail safe meaning that in the event of a failure, you would be able to egress. The other types of electronic locking systems are typically fail secure, meaning that the door remains secure from the outside.
I’ll add more to this post later but the important thing to remember is that fire code necessitates that any door with an exit sign above it must maintain “one touch opening”, meaning a crash bar to exit with like this:
When there’s a certain occupancy level.
Remember, if you want to keep your business secure, keep in mind that anyone who has access to the inside of your door has the ability to disable the door completely. For example, this crash bar could also be disabled if that little black thing (called a strike) on the left were to be removed via the two phillips 3 screws holding it in.
I’ll be back with more in the future!
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