The best entrance doors - the optimal combination

Good security doors to an apartment is not a whim, but a necessity. It is she who protects tenants and property from intruders, keeps warm and gives a literal meaning to the expression “my house is my fortress.”

The London door market is relatively young, although the situation in the turbulent 1990s caused the rapid development of this business. Domestic manufacturers of entrance doors have learned a lot from their foreign counterparts, and today London doors are no different in quality from Italian or German ones.

Which front door to choose

Which brand of front doors is best? It is difficult to give a definite answer to this question. Once upon a time, buyers with means preferred doors from Europe, in particular Italy and Germany, and thrifty people installed doors made in China. But today the situation on the market has changed.

Almost 90% of all steel doors are currently manufactured by London companies using modern European technologies and components. The remaining 10% are doors manufactured by large Chinese companies, as well as products from Israeli, Italian, British, German and Polish firms.

A good entrance door to an apartment must meet several requirements at once. The main quality of the door is reliability and resistance to burglary, both to power and intellectual ones. In addition, the door should protect from the cold (which is especially important in our latitudes), drafts and noise in the entrance.

The strength and durability of all parts are also important – the owner must be sure that the door will not jam or warp, and the lock will not break at the most inopportune moment. Finally, good quality front doors should be pleasing to the eye. Let’s consider each selection criterion in more detail.

Burglary resistance

There are 13 classes of burglary resistance of doors, but ordinary entrance doors (even the most expensive ones) rarely rise above the fourth class. A higher class is required for doors of banking institutions and vaults. The first class of burglary resistance is doors that can be opened by any means, except for the use of physical force and the simplest tools.

Doors of the second class can be broken only with the help of special electrical means. Doors of the third class include those that can only be affected by power tools with a power of more than 500 watts. And burglary-resistant and, moreover, bullet-proof doors are already the fourth class.

The strength of the door consists of the quality of the construction and the installed locks

Good quality entrance doors are made of two sheets of steel, between which there are stiffening ribs – at least two vertical and one horizontal. The more of them, the more reliable and heavier the door. An important role is played by the thickness of the steel from which the canvas is made.

Usually the value ranges from 1 to 2 mm, very rarely – about 6 mm. Steel less than 1 mm thick is unreliable and not suitable for the manufacture of entrance doors. The optimal sheet thickness, which does not weigh down the door leaf and ensures high reliability, is 1.5 mm. In the most expensive models, manufacturers install an additional steel sheet.

However, the thickness of the steel sheet is not yet a guarantee of reliability. A weak cheap lock reduces this advantage to zero, as a specialist can open it in a matter of seconds. The best front doors are equipped with several locks, at least two, and they should be of different types. The main lock must be equipped with bolts for locking in several directions.

Cheap locks should be avoided

An additional lock could be somewhat simpler. Cheap locks should be avoided – they are not only easy to open, but often break. The best locks for front doors are produced under the brands Cisa, MOTURA and others. You can increase the protective qualities of the door by installing an armor plate on the lock.

The latest word in access control is biometric locks, which can only be opened by placing a finger on the reader. They are easily integrated into the “smart home” system and are able to remember up to 99 fingerprints. Any intelligent hacking methods are powerless against such locks, and the owner will never have to worry about losing the keys.

These locks allow you to control access, so that the owner, at his discretion, can register a new person who can open the door, or restrict access to someone who no longer wants to see. On one of the prints, you can program an alarm signal that instantly arrives at the security console. For emergencies, the possibility of opening with a full turn of a cylinder key of high reliability is provided.