This past summer, I went out the front door to do something in the yard. When I went to go back into the house the front door was locked, or so I thought.
The knob would turn, but the door would not open. I went around the house and came in the back way and couldn't open the door from the inside either. It turned out that a small casting inside the latch had broken. The problem was that even though I could remove the handles from each side of the door, there was no way to pull the latch back so the door could be opened. It took about 30 minutes of work to get the door open. The old lockset was at least 15 years old. I replaced the lockset temporarily with one from one of our closets, locked the dead bolt and went to bed. In the morning I went to one of the Borgs and purchase a new lockset and had it rekeyed to match our existing keys.
After installation we noted that the new lockset would automatically unlock whenever you opened the door from inside, thereby preventing you from locking yourself out. This past week we almost locked ourselves out on our raised deck that has the same brand lockset, but it is the older model that does not unlock automatically when opened from the inside.
I wrote to Schlage Customer Service via email and told them the above information and asked if there was a way to make their older locksets unlock automatically. They said that the older sets could not be made to do that, but because their products are warranted to the original owner that they would send me a replacement lockset for the one that broke that they would key to my key number and the new lockset would automatically unlock when opened from the inside, at no charge. This will allow me to replace the lockset going to our deck so there is no way to get locked out there unintentionally.
Thank you Schlage Customer Service
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