Top 5 Sturdiest Security Doors

Enemy At The Gates

The door is both a necessary element of any house, and potentially its greatest vulnerability.

Unless you’ve mastered the art of teleportation or have the ability to phase through solid matter, chances are your home has a door on it. Doors and windows are the two ways through which intruders gain access to your private space and property. Securing windows is relatively easy with grates, shatter-resistant glass or by simply by making them a shape or size through which a human cannot fit.

Doors, for this very reason, are the bigger risk, and the point of ingress the majority of burglars will attempt to exploit. Naturally, locking the doors is the first and foremost security measure. But most locks can be picked and your average door can otherwise be forcibly opened with a well placed kick.

Doors are what stand between you and the world, basically. Intruders, storms, animals and prying eyes are all denied access by these stout rectangles of material bolted into your wall, making it of paramount importance to ensure that your door isn’t easy to break down and that the lock isn’t easily picked.

Security doors generally offer a higher degree of security on all fronts. Hinges are reinforced, the material of the doors are resistant to both the hazards of nature and human attempts to break through, locks are made to be hard to pick, bolts hard to break and frames hard to force apart.

To understand how a security door can protect you, you need to understand how a criminal would try to get past its defenses.

There is a saying that any lock can be picked. While it’s true that with specialized equipment and an infinite amount of time, no lock is impervious to tampering, it is possible to make your lock impossible to pick for the regular burglar.

The basic principle of lockpicking relies on the criminal pushing the locking pins into an open position one by one to open it. Some locks have pins which reset unless under constant pressure (which a key delivers) meaning the criminal would need to keep all of them in place simultaneously. Other locks are simply shaped in a way that lock picking instruments don’t fit in.

When the lock cannot be picked, one method – which, granted, is less and less common due to the required tools – is to force the frame apart so that the lock’s bolt is "slipped out" of the receptacle. This requires a special tool (a very powerful vice) to accomplish, and as house building techniques have improved with time it isn’t particularly viable on newer houses – provided they’ve been made by skilled craftsmen and with good materials. Reinforced door frames can prove far too sturdy to even try this on, regardless of the quality of the walls themselves.

Of course, hit-and-run burglars typically favor kicking the door in or breaking it down. The laws of physics offer a near-universal weak point on all doors which, when kicked, will blow the door right open. Security doors are designed specifically with reinforcements to this weak point in mind, preventing this overly simple method of breaking in. Since most security doors are solid, non-hollow steel or hardwood, breaking them down is also unreasonably difficult.

Naturally, you won’t find many glass security doors, since glass is a major vulnerability. That said, "glass" security doors do exist, but are usually insanely expensive. They are either made from cut and shatter proof security glass, like the kind used for vehicle windshields, or from a transparent material that isn’t glass at all.

Buying a security door doesn’t necessarily mean a massive investment, with some models being as cheap as $100, however this is the kind of purchase where quality will definitely cost you.

Something you should look out for when buying is to make sure that the door eliminates all traditional vulnerabilities, and it’s particularly important to check whether any reviews state that a user suffered a successful break-in – not just because that’s a bad sign, but because the reviewer will likely state which element of the door failed, and that means information on how to get past that particular model is freely available on the internet!

Thickness and material are generally the two most important factors with security doors, but they’re not the be all and end all. A thicker model might still have some shortcomings that place it behind a slightly thinner one. Some security doors are intended as a one-stop solution, being an entire door, while others are add-ons which are attached to the frame of your existing door, and can even potentially be screen doors which allow for ventilation. We’ll be looking at both varieties in this guide.

L.I.F Industries Steel Security Door

If the previous two products didn’t fit your tastes due to being add-ons and thin mesh screens, this option might be a better choice for you. You want a security door? The L.I.F Steel Security door is a solid slab of commercial grade metal to keep any uninvited guests out where they should be.

This door is primarily intended to be installed while the wall around it is still under construction, however it can still be placed after the fact. It is a complete door, not an add-on, so you can’t just pop it in front of an existing port. It is made from galvanneal steel, and in case the drab default gray doesn’t fit the aesthetic direction of your house, can be painted without issue.

Standout Feature

This is a massive, solid slab of steel. It’s going to keep just about anything that tries to go through it without a key out, and will stand up to anything short of a tank. The frame is solid steel as well, so intruders won’t be kicking it down or forcing it open anytime soon

Additional Features

The door’s combination anchors allow it to be installed in either masonry or drywall constructions, and the lock is picking resistant as well. Unlike the other doors we’ve looked at, this comes with all the hardware needed, like knob, lock, bolt and all. One drawback in the construction is that you can’t switch between outswing and inswing or handing on the same door. There are four models for all four configurations, but once you bought one, you can’t flip the hinges or anything of the sort.

Now, technically this is a commercial product intended for use by businesses, however that shouldn’t stop you from making the jump since all that means is that the quality is far higher than most models intended for home use. This door is used by companies to protect their valuables and sensitive property, and that’s the best endorsement it could get.

Unique Home Designs Solstice

The Solstice model from Unique Home Designs’ lineup is a welcome subversion of the stereotype by which to look good a security door needs to sacrifice functionality. While the Solstice isn’t on-par with the L.I.F steel door in terms of raw security, it beats the other add-on doors both in function and in looks.

As mentioned, this is a front mounted add-on door with an intricate steel pattern, the shaping of which is both functional and very good looking. It also comes with a shatter-proof glass inlay, however this can be exchanged for other inlays such as meshes made of various material (though these are sold separately).

Standout Feature

The Solstice door combines form and function in the most elegant way possible. It adheres to the golden rule of glass security doors – make sure there is no glass near the lock assembly. The design of the door seeks to evoke a stylized abstraction of the sun with rays expanding outwards in a semi-circle, and the disk of the sun itself poised where the lock mechanism is. This way a large sheet of steel covers much of the door’s surface right around the lock, so even if the shatter-proof glass is broken somehow, the would be intruders cannot access the door’s inner workings, and the tight spacing of the steel bars would prevent them from getting a hand in, even.

Additional Features

Besides looking absolutely stunning, that one bit of functional design is paired with others. While this is a front-mounted door, it uses special one-directional, one-time use screws which allegedly cannot be removed without causing serious damage to both the wall and the frame. The reason for this is to prevent the door from being easily removed, frame and all, by would be intruders.

The aforementioned feature is a major bonus over the other front-mounted security doors which feature regular screws, but still isn’t enough to put the Solstice on par with doors using interior screws. In fact, this is the sole reason why we didn’t pick it as our number one, since overall security is still the most important factor, and one clever bit of engineering isn’t enough to balance out being front-mounted.

The door comes with a set of brass hardware, so you won’t need to buy that separately, and its handing can be reversed at will.

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Owner of Armored Doors Company Egypt https://armoreddoors.doviral.net/