Lock Rekeying in Mountain View
$32–$50 per cylinder. New pins go into the lock already hanging on the door, and every key handed out before that morning stops working — a fifties house near the park or a unit door in a new block, the job is the same. Each cylinder after the first costs less, since the trip is paid for inside the first one.
$32–$50 per cylinder
Typical price
18 min
Avg. arrival
24/7
Availability
Rekeying is the cheapest useful thing anybody does to a door, and there is nothing unusual about it. The lock stays where it is and takes a new set of bottom pins, so it answers a new key and stops answering every key handed out before today. The hardware does not change. The finish does not change. Only the list of people who can open the door changes.
On the older streets around the center this is plain, ordinary work. A house changes hands and the keys have been through an agent, a stager, a painter and whoever watered the plants. A remodel finishes and the key that lived under a pot has been under that pot for four months. A roommate moves out on good terms and nobody wants the conversation about the spare. None of that is drama. It is an unknown number of keys, and a repin sets the number back to the ones in your hand. Front door, back door, garage service door and a side gate padlock usually come onto one blade where the keyways allow, which is where most households feel the difference: one key on the ring instead of four.
In a building that runs on credentials, half of a turnover is not our half. When a resident leaves, the fob or card is switched off from a desk rather than a key being cut, and that list belongs to the company managing the building. Repinning is the other half, the mechanical one, and it is the ordinary job described above. If the door in question is shared, who orders the work gets settled on the call between you and the building.
The original brass on the older houses is usually worth keeping. A cylinder pulled out of a front door here can nearly always be repinned on the van bench in the time it takes to make coffee, and it will outlast most of what would replace it. There is one honest limit: a plug worn out of round, which happens most often on an outdoor gate cylinder that has taken twenty summers, cannot be repinned usefully. New pins in a worn plug give you a lock that binds on a brand new key. When that is what is in front of you it is said at the bench, and a replacement is priced against the published $133 to $345 rather than slipped into the total.
Rekeying is $32 to $50 per cylinder, with the $89 visit counted once for the stop rather than charged per lock. Four cylinders on one visit is a short hour. Evening between 8pm and midnight adds $52 to the stop and overnight adds $92, both said before the van moves. The old keys are tried in each lock in front of you and seen to fail, and that, rather than the receipt, is the proof.
All sixteen jobs are printed here, fourteen with ranges and two quoted once the doors have been counted on site. What moves a figure inside its range is which door it is and how it opens. One cylinder on a house in the old part of town takes the low end. A door that reads a credential, with a mechanical cylinder under the panel that has not been turned in years, takes the time that cylinder has been owed. Say which door stopped you and the range closes to one figure.
- Daytime (7am–8pm)standard rates
- Evening (8pm–12am)+$52
- Overnight (12am–7am)+$92
FAQ
Lock Rekeying: quick answers
We just closed on a house near the park. Rekey or replace?+
Repin, in almost every case. It retires every key held by the previous owner, the agent and whoever else collected one over the years, and it costs a fraction of new hardware. Replacement is for a lock that has actually failed, not for a lock that merely has a history.
A resident is moving out of our building. Is this the same thing as canceling their fob?+
No, and they are worth keeping separate. Switching off a credential happens from a desk at the company managing the building, on their list, in about a minute. Repinning is metal work on the cylinders that carry keys, at $32 to $50 each. A turnover often needs both, and only the second one is a locksmith visit.
How many locks can be done on one stop?+
As many as the property has. The $89 visit is counted once and each cylinder is $32 to $50, so the second and third doors are the cheap part. Four exterior doors onto one key is usually inside an hour, and the receipt lists each door under the address, which is the shape a turnover file wants.
Related
More residential services
Open 24 hours, 7 days
Say what the door reads, and the rest of the call is short
Mountain View and the mid-Peninsula, at any hour. A fob, a card, a code or a plain key, and how many doors stand between the sidewalk and you — that decides the work, and the work decides the number. The number comes back on the same call with the $89 call-out and the clock already inside it, and it is the number on the receipt. The labor carries 90 days, in writing.