The most commonly asked question that would come to the support staff at Seconline would be in regard to both the door handle side and the door handle height and so the purpose of this blog is to perhaps get some clarification in regard to both terminology and best practice.
The very first thing that we always must have as an unbreakable rule is to be always on the outside of your door looking in. The reason for this is so as to get us to have a definite side to the lock. If you can imagine being on the inside of your door and choosing a left-hand lock while you are looking at it, then if you were to go outside and turn around and look back to the opposite direction and give the door handle as the left-hand, you would be putting it on the opposite side. We can have no grey area in this regard; it is very important to us and to you that we get this correct and therefore the rule of always being on the outside looking in, regardless of whether the door is an in-swinger, out-swinger or sliding, must always be adhered to.
It is not always best practice to have the door lock on the same side as the existing door. It may be totally impractical to have the locks on both sides based on the usage of the door. Let me explain why this may be the case in greater detail. Firstly let me paint the scenario of a particular laundry door where from the inside you walk up to the laundry door and the door handle is on the left; you open the door and swing it back but discover that you're turning right to go to your clothesline. If both door locks are on the same side it would mean that you have to walk out and around that door and in some cases this is very impractical because of fence lines and pathways and so may even be nearly impossible to do with a basket of washing in your hands; it may cause a situation where you have to walk out, close the screen door or security door, turn around with the basket of washing in your hands and proceed off down to the backyard to hang your clothes on the line. The alternative would be to put the security door lock on the right-hand side so as to open up the door and just walk straight out and down to your clothesline. I would think it would be more practical for most doors to be on the same side as the existing door lock, but not always. There are exceptions! Sliding door locks must always go on the same side as the main door lock.
In regard to door lock heights, this is something that needs to be given consideration from both sides of the door. Usually from the inside you will be standing at inside ground level; however, this may not be the case on the outside. It may be a situation where you have to climb a series of steps or stairs and there may be no landing area at the top of the stairs and therefore you may have to back down two or three stairs before you can swing the door open or back up the stairs to gain entry. In this situation it would be significantly better to have a low lock as opposed to a higher lock. In most cases the lock on a security door is above the main door lock; however, again, not always. At Seconline we give our customers the option to have the lock on either side and at the exact height they require it. We even give the option of using existing lock cut outs as an alternative to creating more holes if the existing door handles are in no way clashing with the solid door handles. The locks we use at Seconline are Austral locks and are similar to most other locks with exactly the same cut outs. This means the centre of the handle is usually the centre of the main tongue of the lock. This is not always the case as in the example of a Whitco MII which has the handle 20 mm below the centre of the main tongue. Austral locks are quite standard for all cut out dimensions.
So when considering the lock height and the lock side of the door please give careful consideration to the usage of the door. For further measuring information when purchasing Security Screen Doors Online see the Seconline FAQ page.
