It's also where this very old-school product gets its new-school smarts: you can assign temporary, expiring passcodes for short-term guests, which is awesome for Airbnb hosts, or permanent ones for friends and family. The app is where you get to do all the fun stuff, like unlocking and locking locally and remotely. The second way to unlock the door through the Nest app, which adds a section for the Yale once the setup process completes. Optionally, you can lock the door when leaving the house by tapping the Yale logo again, which I find really helpful. The pad itself is resistive, which means you can be wearing gloves, but also means you have to be very deliberate in your intentions unlike a phone's touch screen, a minor tap won't register. To unlock it with numbers, you touch the Yale logo, which alights the number pad. This execution is both the lock's greatest strength and weakness, which we'll talk about shortly, but for now know that the actual act of unlocking the door is fairly easy. The first is with the keypad, by entering a four to eight digit number. So how do you actually get in, you ask? Two ways, both practical, but one decidedly more analog than the other. Combined with Google Assistant - it's a dream. The additional hardware also allows for remote locking and unlocking, one of the Nest x Yale's most compelling features. It may seem like one extra piece of hardware, but it's also the difference between your lock working sometimes and working every single time. So the lock uses the reliable peer-to-peer Weave smart home protocol to communicate directly with a small accessory, the Nest Connect or Guard, which plugs into a wall nearby and relays the lock's commands to the home router. Why, you ask? Because smartly, Nest wants to ensure a consistent Wi-Fi connection, and given how far away many doors are from the home router, adding large enough antennas inside the already-sizeable kit wouldn't have been possible. Given that I don't have a Nest Secure, I'm glad my unit came with the Nest Connect, since it wouldn't otherwise work. The one catch, and the reason I recommend the $279 kit instead of the cheaper $249 one, is the need for either a Nest Connect adapter or a Nest Guard, the latter of which comes only in the Nest Secure starter kit. Once I figured out the issue, installation posed no more issues, and the Nest app walked me through getting connecting to my Wi-Fi network and getting everything to work with my other Nest products. Installing the Nest x Yale Lock is no different to installation any other lock, which is both good and bad. The difference was only a couple of millimeters - I had to use a putty knife to shave off a bit of the exposed wood in the existing door hole so the deadbolt could move freely around the myriad electronics. I say ideally because it was only on my third attempt at aligning everything that the deadbolt didn't get stuck every time I tried to lock the door. Like most door locks, the "smarts" are on the inside, connecting to the outdoor keypad through a set of wires that, ideally, snap in place without impeding the deadbolt itself. The best comes with ample instructions, including a traceable overlay that allows you to track your door's thickness and width with the deadbolt's parameters. Installation is pretty straightforward, and I was able to get it done with no major modifications to my door. But that one, and none of Yale's other locks, work with Google Assistant, nor do they integrate into the increasingly robust (and sticky) Nest ecosystem.īut let's start from the beginning. In fact, aside from a few cosmetic tweaks, it's nearly identical to the Yale Assure that's been around for a couple of years. First and foremost, the Nest x Yale Lock isn't much different from other smart locks you can buy from Yale.
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