An Electrical Door Lock

Ever see an advertisement and just go out and buy the item? No hesitation. No filter. Afterward you ask yourself, “WTF DID I JUST DO????” That was me with this product.

Now that I've ordered it maybe I should look into it.  Pricey damn thing. Kind of limited information on the company. Google holds the website registration. Address looks legit.

The manufacturer had an air that described to me he or she knew what they were about. Appears they wrote their own web page.  They did a good job. Out of a template it reads like I was hearing the person actually responsible. The manual wasn’t typical. Not bad and a darn site better than the half-baked English on many others.

I have been RVing since the 1970s and cannot count how many times I’ve locked myself out. I have lost keys at the beach, forgotten them in the motorhome, destroyed them … name it. Yeah, I have a key hidden but after an eight mile walk I don’t want to play “dodge the anthills” to try to remember where I put it.

This solves the key problem. I am 100 percent satisfied with this product.

SHIPPING

It was in the mail an hour or so after I ordered it. Arrived without delay. It was well packaged. Somebody thought out even the packaging. I’m betting no marketing department shipped this. This was shipped by the person who wrote the code.

INSTALLATION

As you will see below, “easy installation” wasn’t easy. Not particularly difficult but not easy.

First, the old door cutout was a bit small. A Dremel tool eating away some fiberglass made short work of that problem. Better the lock was too big than too small and wobbly in the hole.

Then the two pins that engage the plate on the jamb didn’t fit. “Adjust the plate” they said. That didn’t do it. I had two problems. When the pins were all the way seated, they were too shallow. I had to get them out of their thread a bit. I took two stainless steel nuts and ground them down to the distance I needed, threaded them on the pins and then threaded the pins into the lock body. That fixed the first problem.

The pin heads themselves were too wide to fit between the jamb and the plate. I removed the pins and ground the face of the pin until they fit. Problem two solved.

I purposely adjusted this to be a tiny bit too tight. I have to push gently on the door to get the deadbolt to pass the jamb. I want it that way.

Two trips camping and many driveway entry and exits later shows the installation is solid.

PROGRAMMING

It took me two days of fooling around to get my own code programmed. My fault entirely. Put in old code. Put in new code. For some reason I stopped there. I reverted to the procedure for my other digital locks. I never read the full line. I had to put in the new code twice. Pain in the butt but all my fault.

KEYS

Over the eighteen years my kids were camping they lost a hundred keys. I still carry five or six extra door keys out of habit. Problem solved. No keys needed.

I still had a few keys made for this lock. The idea that I won’t lose the unnecessary key seems silly to me. I might be able to still get in but I will have still lost the key.

REMOTE

Don’t need it. Maybe when dementia sets in but not now.

RUINED!!!!

I have now ruined the concept of an “RV door lock”. No standard lock will ever again be suitable. When I drive this motorhome into the ground and buy the next one, I will have to have another one of these.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

The manual is available here and on their website.

https://www.rvlock.com

Return to Motorhome Index          Email Steve Wolf, W8IZ