homeassistant

I have had Zwave Yale locks for almost 10 years now and am pretty happy with them. I have the assure SL (mentionned in another comment) on 3 doors right now and they are rock solid.

The battery is reported to Zwave but you will also get some beeping and flashing on the lock itself when the battery gets low, so even if you don't see it in HA it is hard to miss and end up with a dead battery.

As a side note, I always bought the push button variant of those locks and stayed away from the touch pad version. Living in Canada it seemed like a bad choice to deal with touchpads in the winter with the gloves and snow possibly melting on it.

I had the Yale deadbolts at my last house: front door had key backup, backdoor had just keypad. Worked phenomenally, and you can set codes on the fly pretty easily. We had a pet sitter often, so i just created a pin then had it disable when they weren't coming over.

I can't speak to the quality of actual locksets or recommended any products, but LockPickingLawyer on YouTube has a number of short videos discussing smart locks. My impression is most of them are trash at just being a lock. The ones made by traditional lockset manufacturers probably aren't generally good at being smart, but I've been wrong about major brands' commitment to open standards before.

Assuming you can find a decent lock that talks Z-Wave, I think you're on the right track with Zwave2MQTT and a USB dongle. I'd be squeamish about using a Pi specifically in a mission critical security control system for a couple of reasons (reliability, complexity, WiFi interference), but as long as you have keyed backup, it'll probably be OK.

I'll leave it to others to recommend the locks, but as I mentioned in another post her, most battery operated Z-Wave devices, in my experience, report their battery life. Most of mine seem to go from 100% to 70% to dead in about a day though, so accuracy might be hit & miss.

Maybe just leave one door with an old school keyed lockset as a plan B.

I've had three Yale deadbolts for 6+ years and I've never had an issue to where I wished they had a keyway. I love them.

Yale’s Assure SL doesn’t have a key, but you can power it externally with a 9v battery. (And, keys are just another failure point). They also make some keyed variants.

It out of the box doesn’t have any network capability. You can plug in a zigbee or Wifi module to give it connectivity.

Zigbee support is pretty primitive. Basic functionality works fine. Lock, unlock etc. afaik, you can do whatever the unit can do through zigbee commands but I’ve not seen (nor really looked) for a usable interface to it.

[edit] realised I mixed up zwave and zigbee.

Yale with whatever module you find suitable. I use the zwave module.

No keyhole for me. Takes picking out of the equation, and the whole point is to not have a key.

Plenty of warning for low batteries. Batteries last a while, especially if you use Lithium type.

Worst case you can use a 9v battery to jump it from outside.

The Schlage HA integration states that it relies on the cloud (cloud polling), so they go against your fourth point.

I am also interested in something like this for later down the line.