How to Install a Keyless Entry System

With the rise in smarter home technology over last decade, there’ve been a wave of products flooding the market designed to simplify your day-to-day lives, and one category of those products are Keyless Entry Lock Systems. Getting locked out of your house sucks so these systems are designed to try and eliminate that from happening by eliminating the need for house keys. Today I’ll be installing the Yale Real Living Keyless Lockset system from zabitat.com. Watch the video above to follow along. This project is about as f&*%ing easy as they come because you can knock out the whole thing with just a screwdriver.

To get started, first remove the old deadbolt and doorknob from the inside of the door with the screwdriver and set them aside.

Once you’ve removed the old lock, unbox your new lockset and organize the components. This lockset comes with a touchscreen keypad, deadbolt and mounting hardware, interior locking mechanism, batteries, and an instruction manual.

When installing this system, the one thing you’ll need to know is the backset of your door. The backset is the distance from the edge of the door to the center of the deadbolt hole in the door. In the US, this is usually 2 ⅜ or 2 ¾”. This deadbolt allows for either backset size, and can be adjusted to fit by pushing the pin on the side and sliding the sleeve in or out.

With that set, now we can install the deadbolt hardware into the door. Next align the new touchscreen keypad and make sure the wiring passes under the deadbolt. Make the deadbolt is in the horizontal, unlocked position and then remove the interior mounting plate from the locking mechanism and attach it to the keypad with the long set screws making sure the wiring stays off to the side in its position. Before tightening fully, make sure the keypad on the outside of the door is plumb to the door edge.

Next remove the battery cover on the interior latch and then attach the wire harness to the back of the latch. Mount the latch to the mounting plate making sure the latch pin slides into the horizontal slit in the deadbolt. In this case there are 2 mounting screws that attach behind the batteries and one at the bottom.

Next install the batteries into the battery compartment and reattach the battery compartment door and follow the instructions to set the code for your lock. Depending on the lock that you choose, some can be unlocked via bluetooth on your phone and others can integrate as part of a whole smart home system so if those features are important to you, make sure you choose one that will work for you.

Next reinstall the doorknob by aligning the screws on the interior side with the mounting holes on the exterior side and tightening them down. Add the collar and doorknob to finish. Lastly remove the old strike plates from the door jamb and replace them with the new matching ones that came with your lock.

Finally test the door and the lock to make sure everything is working properly.

An interesting feature of this lock is that in the event the batteries die and you get locked out you can use a 9 volt battery to bypass the power supply and unlock the door but you still need your code to do it so not just anyone can open your door with a battery. I’m not sure that this is much more convenient than just stashing a spare key somewhere around your house, but I guess you could always ask your neighbor for a 9 volt in a pinch if you had to. So that’s it for this project! It’s a very easy upgrade you can do in about a half hour with just a screwdriver. I hope this episode was helpful in showing you how you can add a little modern touch to your home quickly and easily.

If you liked this project, check out some of these other home upgrade projects.

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