Bringing Your Home and Garden Into the 21st Century

Two situations in which you should get residential security doors

Here are two situations in which you should get residential security doors.

You have sidelights on the sides of your external doors that you want to keep

Sidelights on the sides of external doors can look beautiful and be very effective at bringing natural light into the entryways behind these doors. If you have sidelights on either side of an external door that you want to keep, then you should consider getting a security door for this entrance. Whilst they are a lovely decorative feature, sidelights can also facilitate an intruder's entry into a property. If these windowpanes are adjacent to a standard door, an intruder could shatter one of them, stretch their arm through the broken pane and then access the door's lock or handle from the inside and open it.

If you're concerned about this but are not prepared to give up your home's sidelights, then getting a security door could be the answer. Any intruder who manages to shatter a sidelight's pane will not be able to open the security door just by accessing the interior lock, as security doors usually have multiple locks, some of which will require a key or a security code to unlock and won't, therefore, be openable by a person just because they have access to the interior part of the door. As such, if you get a security door in this situation, you should be able to enjoy the aesthetic advantages of having the sidelights without having to be concerned about the risks they might pose to the security level of your home.

Your dog or cat has worked out how to open your standard external door

Many dogs and cats are intelligent enough to work out how to open standard external and internal doors if those doors have levers or handles that they can jump and lean on with their paws. If your pet has figured out how to do this and you've caught them opening your external doors several times, it might be worth getting security doors.

Your dog or cat can cause all kinds of issues if they are able to open doors by themselves. First and foremost, they could open an external door when you're not nearby and escape. Secondly, if you have very young children, and your pets leave the external doors open, your children might wander out. Thirdly, if these doors are left open, an opportunistic intruder could see this and just let themselves into your home. By getting security doors that you can only open by turning locks (as opposed to levers or handles), you can stop your pets from opening these doors and creating security problems for you and your family.