Ray Okafor

Staff Writer

Ray Okafor has swung a hammer on Habitat for Humanity builds around Atlanta for the better part of a decade, and somewhere along the way became the volunteer everyone handed the lockset box to. Hanging doors and fitting deadbolts on house after house taught him the thing no spec sheet mentions: most smart lock problems are not software problems. They are a misaligned strike plate, a door that swelled in August, a backset that does not match, a bolt that needs a shoulder behind it to throw. He writes about smart locks, keypads, deadbolts, garage door controllers and package theft for BeSafe Home Security. Porch piracy is personal: his street in East Atlanta lost packages steadily for two years, which is how he ended up testing every combination of doorbell camera, lock box and delivery setting he could get his hands on. Georgia humidity does the rest of his quality control, swelling wood doors and corroding anything with exposed contacts. Ray still does the installs himself, on real doors, and he will tell you plainly when a lock is fine but the door it is going on is the actual problem.