Unboxing the Kwikset SmartCode

Hi Dave Johnson editor of eHow Tech, and I kind of live by one really important adage which is if it doesn’t take batteries I really don’t want it as a gift. And that’s why when I moved into my new house and I discovered that it had those stone age door locks that don’t require electricity, I knew I needed to do something about it and I actually got this guy, it’s the Kwikset touchpad keyless entry lock. It replaces the dead bolt you have on the front of your house; you don’t need to carry a key with you because you just enter the code. Let’s open this up and take a look at it and I’ll show you it’s actually really easy to put together and it’s a great gift for the dad maybe in the family who loves gadgets and wants to turn the front of their house into a gadget. Now I was initially fairly intimidated by this sort of thing because as much as I love gadgets and I like technology and that sort of thing, I’m not really all that handy with tools, so I was very happy to find that this is pretty easy to do. It took me maybe an hour. So it comes with the instructions and then the various parts. This is the keypad obviously, this goes on the front of the door and this goes around the back of the door so you can manually lock and unlock your door and this slides up to reveal how you program it so you can do anywhere between four and eight digits for your passcode to get into the house. So you can do two different codes, so you give a different code to the babysitter or something like that. And then this slides out, that’s where the batteries go. Let me just pull out, here’s all the various pieces, parts and it does come with real keys which you can use as well. Let me just kind of put this together so you can see how easy it is to program. So now you can imagine that this is hooked up to your door. If you pull this off, and to program it there is a button here and then you enter the code and then it’s programmed. So for example, I might want my code to be 1-3-5-7-9, now I pressed the lock button. It’s now programmed. So now I come home from work and I punch in – Look at that, isn’t that awesome? I pressed the lock button and it locked for me. And it works really really well, you might get the sense that I’m excited about this. This is the kind of gadgets where technology and like normal, real-life stuff cross over and I love coming home and being able to unlock my doors this way. And I never have to carry a key, so if you have somebody in your family that’s like me, definitely look into a touch-key pad for the front door.