Ten small changes, ranked honestly by what they actually do. Some of the items on this list are worth an afternoon; a couple are worth almost nothing and are on it because everybody expects them to be. What to say on the phone — about the short list of upgrades actually worth doing or anything else — is set out on the locksmith near me page.
Marking Randburg Safety Week with ten small changes that punch above their weight.
1. Replace all garden padlocks
Rusted padlocks are a soft target.
2. Add window locks to ground-floor windows
Cheap, discreet, effective.
3. Fit door viewers
Never open to a stranger you can't see.
4. Change your alarm code
When did you last change it? Do it today.
5. Trim shrubbery near windows
Removes hiding places.
6. Fit a chain latch on the front door
Old-fashioned and still effective.
7. Add a decoy sign
Alarm and dog signs work, even without a dog.
8. Motion-triggered lights
Startle wins.
9. Register keys with your locksmith
So copies can't be made without your say-so.
10. Book a security walk-through
Free from most local locksmiths, ours included.
Do these three first
Move every key needed to leave the house so it hangs beside the door it opens, and make sure everybody living there knows which door is the way out. On the heavily barred housing that makes up a good share of Randburg, this is the difference between being able to leave and hunting through a kitchen drawer in the dark. It costs nothing and takes ten minutes.
Then walk the outside of the property and count the openings, in the order somebody arriving would meet them. Not from memory — from the garden. On extended older houses the number is routinely two or three higher than the owner would have given, because a door that has had a bookshelf in front of it for a decade has stopped being a door in everybody's mind.
Then deal with anything that has started needing a knack. A door that wants a lift, a gate that wants a shove, a mechanism that has to be jiggled — every one of those is a warning, not a quirk, and it will finish failing at a moment of its own choosing. As a booked visit it is small; at eleven at night it is a call-out.
Sightlines beat hardware, and they are free
Trimming a shrub back from a side passage does more for most properties than a lock upgrade, because what defeats hardware is uninterrupted time and screening is what supplies it. Planting grows a little each year and nobody notices the moment a passage stopped being visible from the kitchen window — which is why this is worth doing deliberately rather than when it looks untidy. The short list of upgrades actually worth doing is one of the reasons a locksmith in Randburg ends up looking at a property before quoting on it.
The same applies to anything that has been put down and left: a bin store, a trailer, a stack of building material, a pile of offcuts against a wall. Each of those creates a place to stand out of sight, and each is free to move. Walk round with the specific question of where somebody could stand unobserved, and the list writes itself.
Lighting on the approach is the third of these, and the cheapest genuine improvement most properties can make. It is not about seeing an intruder; it is about whether anybody passing would register something as out of place. A light that has not worked since last winter is doing nothing, and replacing the bulb is not a security project.
The key count is the invisible one
Every item on this page so far is visible. The key count is not, and on most properties it is the one thing that has never been decided by anybody. A house that has been sold, let, renovated or simply lived in for a decade has a number of keys in existence that accumulated one perfectly reasonable handover at a time. There is a separate page on lock repair work for anybody whose problem sits closer to that end of it.
Resetting it takes one short visit, is inexpensive, and converts an unknowable figure into one you chose. On a short, closely overlooked street it does considerably more for a property than any hardware would, because it addresses the only realistic way somebody walks into a house on a road where nobody could work at a door unnoticed.
Include the gate and any remotes in that count, because both are handed out more casually than door keys and neither leaves a trace when copied. A lock change across the reachable openings plus a remote count is the whole exercise, and it is usually a morning.
The items on the list that are nearly free
Garden padlocks are worth replacing when they have rusted, and worth thinking about beyond that: a padlock on a garden store is proportionate to a lawnmower and not to a store that now holds power tools. Plenty of sheds have been quietly promoted over a decade without anybody reconsidering the door.
Door viewers are cheap, take twenty minutes and mean nobody ever has to open a door to find out who is there. Ground-floor window fastenings are similarly inexpensive and worth having where an opening is genuinely reachable — which, after the walk in the first section, you now know rather than guess.
Changing an alarm code is free and is the sort of thing nobody has done since the system was installed. The same is true of any door code: a code is repeated rather than handed over, so a code shared with a contractor three years ago is now known to an unknowable number of people and has never been changed. Anybody looking for a locksmith in Ferndale instead will find that suburb covered on its own page.
The items worth being sceptical about
A chain latch on a front door is on every list of this kind and it is largely reassurance. It is defeated easily under force, and its actual use — answering a door partially — is better served by a viewer, which lets you not open the door at all. If you like having one there is no harm in it; it should just not be counted as a security measure.
Decoy signage is genuinely marginal. An alarm sign on a property with no alarm may deter the least committed attempt and it is transparent to anyone paying attention. It is cheap enough that there is no strong argument against it, and it should not displace an item from the first section of this page.
And motion lights are worth having with one caveat: a light that triggers forty times a night on a windy street trains the household and the neighbours to ignore it entirely. Positioned and adjusted properly they are useful; installed and forgotten, they become part of the background within a fortnight. Anybody wanting the longer version should read our discount for older households as well.
The one that only matters on some properties
Controlled-duplication keys — an arrangement where copies cannot be cut without your authority — are genuinely valuable in specific situations and unnecessary in most households. If several people hold keys, if the property is let, if there are staff or a rotating group of helpers, then it converts key control from an honour system into an administrative one.
If two people have carried the same key for eleven years, it solves a problem you do not have. That is worth saying because it appears on every list of security recommendations regardless of the property, and it is one of the easier items to be sold on the strength of a general principle rather than your particular circumstances.
The way to decide is the same as everywhere else on this page: count the people who legitimately hold a key. If the answer is two, skip it. If the answer is six and one of them is a contractor from 2021 whose key never came back, then the useful item is not controlled duplication — it is a reset, today.
What a walk-through should actually tell you
A useful assessment ends with a short list, in order, of the things that would make a difference on your property specifically. Not a catalogue. If it comes back as ten items on a property with one realistic way in, it was written before anybody looked, and the ordering matters more than the length. There is a separate article on how quickly a lock can be opened if that is closer to the problem in front of you.
It should also be willing to come back as very little. Plenty of Randburg homes on short, closely overlooked streets genuinely need a key reset and a stiff mechanism dealt with, and nothing else. Being told that is more useful than being sold a package designed for a property with an entirely different exposure — a plot backing onto open ground, a stepped site, a rear boundary onto a footpath.
And it should mention what it found rather than only what it proposes: the frame, the keeper, the hinges, how far the cylinder protrudes, which openings are reachable, where somebody could stand unobserved. Those observations are the assessment. Everything else is a quote, and a quote without them is for a part rather than for your house.
Doing the whole list in one weekend
Start indoors, because the free items live there. Walk through the house moving each gate and door key to hang beside the opening it belongs to, then tell everybody who lives there which door is the way out. Change the alarm code while you are at it, and any door code that has been the same since it was installed — codes are repeated rather than handed over, so an old one is known to an unknowable number of people.
Then go outside and count. Openings in the order somebody arriving would meet them, asking at each whether it could be reached without climbing and whether somebody could stand there unseen. Trim back whatever has grown across a side passage, move the bin store that blocks a view from the kitchen, and replace the bulb in the light that stopped working last winter. None of that costs anything and all of it acts on the only variable that matters.
What is left after that is a short list, usually two or three items, and it is the list worth spending on. On most properties it means a correctly sized cylinder on the reachable openings and a key count somebody has chosen — ordinary residential locksmith work, and a good deal cheaper than the package that tends to get quoted.