I wear glasses.

While I don’t have really bad vision, I do get super squinty if I take my glasses off and I have yet to muster up the nerve to go in and get fitted for contacts. It’s not really the thought of placing a tiny lense on my eyeball that grosses me out. It’s the thought of trying to get said tiny lense off of my eyeball that bothers me.

What if my fingernail scratches my eye?! What if the lense somehow suction cups itself to my eyeball only to remain there forever?! What if my eye mutates into a monster eye from the chemicals after it suction cups onto my eye?!

There are entirely too many possibilities.

So, instead, I remain in my glasses. Which often leads people to ask me, “Are you near-sighted or far-sighted?”

And every single time I have to stop and think! Because, to this day, I have a hard time remembering which is which. (I’m near-sighted. I can’t see things far away.)

It’s the same way with fail safe locks and fail secure locks so I thought it wouldn’t hurt to brush up on the meaning of both.

Fail Safe Locks

A lock is considered fail safe when all power is lost to an electronic lock and the lock is no longer secure. These work great with non-fire-rated doors.

Do you remember the movie Panic Room with Jodie Foster? The creepers were trying to break into her house and she had a room where she hit a button and it locked her and her daughter in the room where they could be safe.

Well, fail safe locks would have been a death sentence for Jodie in that movie because one of the first things the bad guys did was cut power to the house.

Fail Secure Locks

Fail secure locks are the exact opposite of fail safe locks. When power is lost in a facility that is equipped with fail secure locks, those locks remain secure. These are ideal in most facilities and are significantly more popular than fail safe locks.

Fail secure locks are used n facilities that highly valuable material such as pharmacies or banks. This keeps all items within the facility secure in case of a power outage.

The great thing about electronic hardware though, is that even if you have a mixture of fail secure and fail safe locks located throughout the facility, you can have hardware that matches, giving you a consistent look throughout.

Are you considering fail safe or fail secure locks for your facility? Confused about which would work best for you? We can help you out. Give us a call and we’ll point you in the right direction.