Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Unlock with touch!”.
Thanks to level for sponsoring this video, so i should tell you: don’t try this at home, but uh smart home products are huge. You can get almost every appliance in your house can have some sort of brains. If you wanted to you want a smart frying pan. They got you covered. You want a smart microwave there’s a product for that, but oftentimes these smart products, nothing more than add complexity and unnecessary software updates. But when there’s a product that comes out that actually adds convenience and makes life easier and is smart for useful sake and not smart for smart’s sake.
I tend to pay attention, so this is where level comes in. I talked about them a few months ago with their first product, the level bolt. It was a smart bolt that went inside of your existing lock but they’re back again with a new product. This is level touch, so the level touch is a full block solution and i look at it and i kind of just want to talk about it as being a lock. This is what locks should be in 2020.. So a lot like a traditional lock that you’re used to here you get a keyhole side and you get a thumb, turn side and the puck motor inside so essentially you’re getting the level smart internal. So that’s a motor, a deadbolt and the battery inside which keeps the whole thing extremely compact, but you also get the outside housing included, but what it does is a lot more, so it’s called level touch because it’s got capacitive touch around it.
You can touch and it’ll unlock the door for you, it’s a very simple process, but compared to a ton of other locks on the market with smart functionality. This thing is tiny. If you didn’t know better, you would never know.
This thing is other than an old-school. Deadbolt, you don’t have a huge or battery component on one side of the door. This is all inside of the lock itself.
So in the previous video there is one question that i got more than any and you can see what it is like. How secure is the lock if it’s hollow the battery goes in like? Is it safe? And quite honestly i had the same question too. So so fun fact it might surprise you as much as it surprised me when i found out about it.
Most deadbolts are made with sheet metal and are hollow inside, except for, like a thin rod down the middle, but i just had to see that like firm, myself plus, i got ta use power tools, so levels bolt is made from 440c stainless steel. It’S a hardened high strength, corrosion resistant metal. This metal is like usually found in things like surgical equipment, industrial ball, bearings and other really like high impact places, so that gives it an a rating in security.
So now you know so there’s a third party grading system that industry used as a standard that grades locks on three categories. So it’s security, it’s durability and finish and level touch achieved, a’s in each category, so those are the highest it can get. If you want to read the reports or learn about standard for yourself i’ll link to it all down below, but the moral being, this thing is crazy, secure all right, so sure the thing is secure, but now you have to install it what you are getting from Level with the level touch is extremely simple: i mean they’ve utilized magnets and a bit of magic. This whole thing holds itself together, i mean the steps to install are very minimal and easy if you’ve never installed a lock before smart, lock or otherwise. You should have no problem doing this, so this is where i think level separates themselves, i’m even just from the unboxing. You can see that there’s a very clear focus on the design and that filters through to the lock i mean from the elegance of installing it to the use of magnets.
You can see that they thought about absolutely everything that goes in here i mean even the battery itself, magnetizes onto the cap. That goes into the bolts. I mean it is really simple and easy to install, usually with locks. You almost need a third hand to hold things in place with a little touch. You just put it together and you’re good to go. It’S important to me to have an easy way for my family to get in and out of my house having a lock that works with me and my routine is just really helpful, but it not only works for me.
It works my entire family circle or, i guess, bubble right now and get everyone the option to use the lock how they want. So the easiest and most straightforward way is just by touch. The entire keyhole side is touch sensitive, so you can touch it unlock it without like needing to put a key in. I really like the ability to just have my phone authenticate that i am who i am touch the lock and go in for me. That’S cool! It’S a novelty and it’s worked really well for me. Touching the lock is obviously pretty easy. You just physically touch it, but what it’s doing to authenticate that it’s you you’ve got an app on your phone. It verifies that that phone is indeed on you and is close by using bluetooth, and it will allow you to enter your home.
So sometimes you want like other options, so you can open up the app and you can control the lock from there. You hold it down, it’ll, lock or unlock. You could set up access from there. If you want that somebody else’s phone to be used as a key uh, you get all the options for what you want your lock to do.
Inside of the app you get auto, lock and unlock with proximity and geo fencing for that you don’t need a hub, which i found super awesome. It just works with the app and your phone, obviously on ios or android, but if you are on ios, you do have homekit support and that’ll work with things like siri or setting up automations. If you want and then last, if you want to go old school, you do have a normal key.
You can just put in in turn, so i know for my parents. They just prefer to carry a key, but for my wife she wants set up a geofence which doesn’t have to really think about it, and for me i like to touch it to know that my door is secure. So having these options is what has made this. The lock to have but there’s one more way i found this lock to be essential, so the more i used level touch at home, the more i thought it might really be useful at the studio location. So if you don’t know, we moved into a new studio about three months ago and we are very clearly not moved in at our old studio. I was paying for an enterprise lot and it worked well for the five years.
We were there, but i was paying for it every month. It was a really significant upfront cost to get that installed. So i was kind of drawn to the level touch because i kind of got the same functionality with the key cards, so these cards use nfc to lock or unlock the door.
Think of it like a hotel key, and that means i can hand these out and then program them based on need ability to give access, take access back access to certain times. If somebody’s coming to clean the studio, for example, i could just give them access when they need, i get all the same functionality i was paying for with the enterprise solution, with the level touch with no monthly costs at all and way lower uh upfront cost. So i get the peace of mind without having to pay all that money, so i can order more nfc cards and i can give everybody who comes to the studio their own card, so they don’t have to carry a key which is awesome if keys get lost. I have to deal with changing all the locks here and they should lose that key card.
I can just deactivate it right from my phone uh. It gives me peace of mind. It lets things, be a lot easier for them to just put in their wallet. Instead of having to hold physical keys and also provides me just more security, so that’s level touch, and what struck me here was that this should just be how we think of a lock products in 2020 should have smarts. I don’t do this as a smart lock. I just view this: how things should be? There should be products that generally serve a purpose and making our life easier and give us choice, and that’s what the level touch has been for me.
If you think it might work for you and your use cases click the link down below to check it out. If you want to pick one up, there’s a ton of smart, lock options out there. This is a really good way that it can fade. In the background, but also give you a ton of choice for how you want to interact with your door, .