How to prevent front door from opening when somebody enters the house through the back door

I just noticed that when my daughter entered the house via the back door, the front door automatically opened. This is not what I was hoping for. I like the auto-open functionality but it should not open in this case. If my daughter only used to drop something off (in the garden) and then decides to leave, she will never have noticed that the front door is open. How to prevent this without disabling the auto-open functionality entirly?

3 Likes

You could try to restrict the Bluetooth range (public feature now for some time).

For Android devices you’ll find this feature in the Auto Unlock Settings / Expert Setting:
Auto Unlock Speed

Be aware though that changing expert settings can change the general Auto Unlock experience so test it thouroghly. If this doesn’t work for you, you would have to deactivate Auto Unlock to be sure it doesn’t happen.

The minimum Geo-fencing distance is now 50 meters. Is it possible to reduce that to 5 meters? And is it possible for the lock to know from where the person is approaching the lock? If approaching the lock from inside the house -> Do nothing. Only when approaching the lock from ‘outside’ the house -> Open Lock…
Of course this will probably mean that the users should be able to declare what area is considered inside and outside the house… Is that technically feasible? Should I list this wish in the ‘Feature request’ section?

Values <50 m for geofence showed to be no good idea due to inexact values from position detection (depending on the quality of the sensors of the device and location specific interfering factors).

And as we only have one reference point for BLE we have no way to be sure from which direction the Smart Lock is approached.

This is absolutely a disaster and barely works as intended!!

On the beta whe could set or own custom values
That worked perfect for me the first time since Auto unlocked what’s introduced

Maybe Nuki bridge can be used as second reference point for bluetooth?

1 Like

What @Geert is looking for is basically a grouping of Nukis into “Buildings” and a function to tell the App that it only performs one Auto Unlock per building and cancels all others after the 1st one was successfull. A feature that makes sense for people with multiple Smart Locks and - i think - is currently not present in the feature request category (https://developer.nuki.io/c/feature-requests).

1 Like

@Juergen what you describe might be applicable for other users, but not for me. I only have 1 lock (on the front door) and I live in a separate house (not in a building). As I described I do not want the front-door (with Smart-lock) to open when somebodys enters the house thru the back-door (without Smart-lock).

1 Like

Ah ok, got it. You should mount a Nuki at the back door too :wink:

In this case it’s really about detecting whether one approaches a Nuki from the inside or from the outside which is nearly impossible given the many different possible setups, even with a 2nd BLE reference point.

I have the same experience like @Geert, but I realized some time ago the technical limitations that @Juergen described today.
For us, it is not a major issue because we barely enter the home from backside, but if people enter frequently i.e through a garage or other side door, I can see the issue.
Not sure if Nuki APIs have a way that could abandon an AU if a separate door gets opened, i.e detected by a smarthome or a second Nuki, but this definitely needs some effort.
Other than that, I think it simply doesn’t work with the concept that Nuki has, and therefore one has to live with it or disable AU.

@Juergen if I do mount a second lock on my back door, how will this prevent the front-door from opening when somebody enters the back-door? And how sure are you that the back-door will open instead of the front-door? Of what I have learned until know, I would not be surprised if I approach my house from the back, that the front-door and the back-door will open simultaneously. This also is not very desirable…

Mounting a 2nd SL still requires the feature mentioned here in order to work properly: How to prevent front door from opening when somebody enters the house thru the back door

I have this exact problem with 2 SmartLocks. When I activate “Auto Unlock” it opens the back (or front) door as expected but then, once inside the house it will also open the other door automatically. I can de-activate the back door Auto Unlock functionality and open the back door manually but it still will activate the Auto Unlock at the front door once I am inside my house. I like the idea of @Juergen to allow only one Auto Unlock and to cancel other SmartLocks from unlocking. That would be a perfect solution. How do I go about requesting such a feature? Thank you for all your great work.

1 Like

Not sure if Nuki APIs have a way that could abandon an AU if a separate door gets opened, i.e detected by a smarthome or a second Nuki, but this definitely needs some effort.

What about enabling the other doors with a Nuki Door Sensor? Basically if any door is opened based on Door Sensors, it should disable AU. @Juergen Is this something that could be done? I have the same issue if I enter via the garden door, then I come in the house and pass by the front door, and it pops open. I would be happy to buy the sensors if this would resolve it.

Adding a door sensor to the picture does not help. The door sensor is not build to work as a separate device and needs a Smart Lock attached to it. The only real solution is to also mount a Smart Lock (or Opener) to the other door and stop an active AU for all nearby Smart Locks if a successful AU is triggered for one of them as described above. If you use an Opener it would not even need to be mounted. Just laying there next to the secondary door would to the trick too.

This could be improved by abusing a fob/door sensor to act as pure BLE marker, which does the same. i.e. when the marker is found by the AU for nearby Smart Locks is stopped. The effort for this is much higher as it would require implementation of such a mode into the firmware of this products and a proper flow so that every end consumer is able to understand how to set this up.

Thanks for the great in-depth review. I guess what you suggest above is probably the easiest to implement and explain to users. I didn’t find the link to the suggestion here, so:
Automatically Disable auto-unlock - Feature requests - Nuki Developers