High-Security Locks: What’s Best for You?
The Mul-T-Lock Cronus High-Security Deadbolt
High-Security Locks: An Overview
When it comes to keeping your business, home, or property secure, High-Security Locks are a versatile and relatively unobtrusive countermeasure to crime that can be installed on a wide variety of platforms, making them a common sight across many Bay Area properties. However, not all High-Security locks are created equal; different brands and models have unique features, designs, and applications that make them either more or less susceptible to various means of intrusion commonly employed by criminals.
With property crime in the Bay Area frequently reaching the highest recorded levels in all of California (Public Policy Institute of California), being able to discern which High-Security lock model is best suited for your security needs is an invaluable skill to possess – and one that we here at B&B want to help you curate through this brief overview and comparison of the High-Security lock market within the United States. In this case, we’ll be examining by far the two most common High-Security-rated lock brands in service throughout California: Medeco and Mul-T-Lock.
Why Invest in a High-Security Lock?
To begin, it’s important to understand some of the common techniques and methods that thieves use to compromise property security and access your valuables. Though breaking open a door or other access point via sheer brute force is a tried and tested approach, doing so often leaves evidence behind for law enforcement and clearly lets the property owner know that they have been breached, as well as likely setting off break-in alarms if they have been installed.
As such, most cases of break-ins and theft involve methods such as lock picking or lock bumping, which can be performed much more quietly and subtly than physical attacks, and which may even allow thieves to repeatedly steal valuables from the same property without being detected. Moreover, lock picking and bumping are surprisingly easy skillsets to pick up and learn, permitting even relative amateurs the ability to covertly access fortified areas with enough practice and time.
Investing in lock designs with advanced elements such as anti-picking and anti-bumping countermeasures is a must for clients interested in serious theft and break-in protection, as even the mere presence of a lockpick-resistant design on a property can be enough to deter or ward off a break-in attempt in entirety.
Which brings us back to the core of this piece – Medeco and Mul-T-Lock. Each brand has similarities and differences in design intended to make them substantially more resilient to break-in attempts than common locks, though which one you end up choosing will depend on the types of threats that you are hoping to defend against and the primary means of unauthorized entry that you are hoping to deny.
The Nuts & (Dead)Bolts
There are three primary security criteria used to evaluate the effectiveness of each brands’ High-Security Lock models:
- Deadbolt Strength/Physical Durability
- Key Control/Duplication Protection
- Lock Picking + Bumping Resistance
Let’s take a look at how Medeco and Mul-T-Lock’s product lines stack up against each other in each of these categories.
Deadbolt Strength and Physical Durability:
In the first category, Medeco’s high-end lock lineup holds the advantage in raw durability and defense against kinetic break-in attempts, with an extra-tough external construction and built-in resistance even to specialized anti-lock drilling. As you might imagine, the time and material requirements needed to drill through a hardened lock and the obvious noise and residue generated by doing so makes the prospect unappealing to the vast majority of thieves, making Medeco’s high-security designs highly effective at deterring (or failing that, outright foiling) physical attacks on the lock body and mechanism.
If your primary concern is simply preventing a straightforward brute force attack on your home or business, then Medeco’s lineup of high-security locks is your best bet. However, for reasons we’ll go into below, raw physical defense isn’t the end-all be-all of property security and unauthorized access denial.
Key Control/Duplication Protection:
For the second category, Mul-T-Lock has a key (no pun intended) advantage; even by the rigorous standards of the High-Security Lock market, Mul-T-Lock goes to exceptional lengths to safeguard against unauthorized key duplication, using a specialized proprietary hardware/software combination solely designed to regulate key copying. While this hyper-rigorous approach to key production and distribution may pose a slight initial annoyance for managers of larger properties with multiple key sets and access points, the upside is that unauthorized copying of Mul-T-Lock keys is virtually impossible and, as far as we are aware, entirely unheard of in the locksmithing world, making it by far the best option for defending against unauthorized access via false duplicates.
Lockpicking + Bumping Resistance:
Returning to our previous section, you may recall that brute force attacks are comparatively inefficient and unpopular compared to lock picking and bumping. As such, these are the primary threats and avenues of entry most clients will want to safeguard against, and for that purpose, Mul-T-Lock again comes out on top. While Medeco does have advanced key and lock designs (on paper), they have nonetheless been exposed to critical vulnerabilities and design flaws over their service life, with even newer models still being susceptible to basic lockpicks – a vulnerability that our locksmiths have had to address and fix first-hand in multiple residential cases.
Mul-T-Lock, by contrast, has a well-earned reputation for picking and bumping resistance, and has a proven track record of foiling would-be lockpicks, making it a substantially better option for ensuring comprehensive property security. Additionally, while Medeco does retain the lead in terms of pure physical durability, Mul-T-Lock just barely falls into 2nd place behind it, and remains a highly durable and physically resilient high-security lock in its own right.
Conclusion
Medeco locks make up the majority of high-security lock designs in use throughout the United States in both residential and commercial contexts, and cover most of the surface-level functions of security passably well. However, Medeco locks have known lockpicking exploits and critical gaps in defense when it comes to picking and bumping, which are increasingly common and prevalent means of gaining unauthorized access to structures and businesses, especially in the Bay Area. As such, our locksmithing experts at B&B recommend Mul-T-Lock for nearly all applications and uses asides from basic physical protection, in which it is still only narrowly beaten out by Medeco.
As a fully licensed and registered Mul-T-Lock dealer, our team at B&B are experts at installing and maintaining the extended Mul-T-Lock family of High-Security locks. We also have our own unique Mul-T-Lock keyway, entirely negating the risk of key duplication from unauthorized parties relating to Mul-T-Lock units that we install. For more information about the benefits of the Mul-T-Lock family and how B&B can help install it for your home or business, please feel free to follow this link to our previous article on the Mul-T-Lock line, view an example of a residential installation of a Mul-T-Lock unit on our Instagram, or head over to our YouTube channel to see our lead technician Russell’s hands-on overview video.
Stay safe and stay informed!
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