Access control · SALTO · Space, KS and Homelok
Two hundred doors controlled without pulling a cable.
SALTO is not a platform with locks: it is an electronic lock with a platform behind it. That lets you control doors where cabling was impossible, and it brings a trade-off you need to understand before you sign.
What it is, and what problem it solves.
The problem is the cable. Controlling a door the classic way means taking power and data to it, and there are buildings where that cannot be done.
Cabled access control asks, at every door, for an electric lock, a reader, a cable back to a cabinet and power. On a new build that is normal. In a building in use, in a listed one, in a full hotel or on a rented floor, that is building work nobody is going to approve.
SALTO solves it from another direction: the electronics go inside the lock itself or inside the cylinder, with its own battery and its own reader, and it is fitted into the hole the door already has. No cable, no cabinet and no power. What used to be two hundred impossible doors becomes two hundred controlled doors in a few days.
Hence the places you find it: hotels, care homes, listed buildings, rented offices, clinics and lockers. And the management comes in three shapes depending on the case: Space with your own server, KS as a cloud service and Homelok for housing.
How it works, and why it is different.
The central idea is that the permission travels in the credential. The lock is not connected to anything: it reads the card or the phone, checks what the credential carries written on it —which doors and on what schedule— and opens or does not open. The record of what has happened stays inside the lock and is collected later.
Alongside that there are online doors, cabled or wireless, which do find out straight away what is decided on the platform. A real installation is a mixture of the two, and getting the mixture right is the whole design job: it is not a budget question, it is which doors cannot wait.
An advantage you appreciate and that is almost never in the comparison: an electronic lock always lets you get out from the inside through its own mechanics, and it has an emergency key. Compared with a magnet or an electric lock, that takes half the evacuation conversation off the table.
Four questions from the data sheet.
- What kind of door each door is, in joinery terms: leaf type, thickness, door furniture and whether it is a fire door. A door with a certificate does not take just anything, and the certificate outranks the catalogue.
- Which doors go online and which do not, and who signs off that list. It is the decision that weighs most on the life of the system.
- Battery life in real use, how the lock warns you before it runs out and how it is opened if it does run out completely. With a replacement calendar, not with a «it'll let us know».
- How many events each lock stores and how they are collected. If you need a serious audit trail on internal doors, that is checked beforehand and not afterwards.
What having no cable costs you.
This section is the reason it is worth reading this whole page. It is not a minor snag: it is how you design this properly.
Taking somebody's access away is not instant on the doors that are not connected. The lock does not know you have cancelled that card: it will know when it receives that information, and it receives it wherever the credentials go through. In the meantime, that internal door still opens. Anyone who does not say this before signing says it worse afterwards.
So you design accordingly, and that is what is not in the brochure: the street doors and the sensitive ones go online; the internal ones do not. And the reader at the entrance does the job of updating the credentials of everybody who arrives in the morning, so that the changes spread through the building on their own. With that pattern the delay stops mattering — except for whoever does not come through the entrance, and that is the question to ask door by door.
The other two trade-offs: batteries run down, so there is a replacement calendar and not a reaction to a warning; and the log of a door that is not connected lives in the lock, with limited capacity, and somebody has to go and get it. And if the management is chosen in the cloud, the usual conversation comes back: hosting region, processor contract and transfers, in writing.
Who it fits, and who it doesn't.
It fits where the cable is the problem and where credentials circulate a lot. In a hotel it is almost the definition of the product: the card expires at check-out time and reception issues it on the spot. The same in care homes, listed buildings and rented offices.
It does not fit as the only system where you need real-time logic on every door: interlocks, fine evacuation headcounts, immediate revocation anywhere. You can force it by putting everything online, and then you lose the reason you chose it.
The normal thing, and the honest recommendation, is not SALTO instead of a platform: it is SALTO for the doors that are not going to be cabled, inside an installation where something else runs the perimeter and the critical zones. That does mean talking about integration, and there is small print there.
What we do with it.
- The door survey, which here is joinery before electronics: leaf, thickness, door furniture, hand, fire-door status. That is where these projects get stuck, and it is solved by measuring, not by asking.
- The design of the mixture: which doors online, which not, where the points that update the credentials go and how much delay is accepted in each zone. Written down and signed by whoever answers for the security of the site.
- The fitting and the commissioning: locks and cylinders, online doors, credential issuing, schedules and groups, and a door-by-door test with a certificate.
- Whatever integration is needed: with the booking system in a hotel, or with the platform already running the rest of the building. Tested on a mock-up and with its limits written down.
- The maintenance, which with electronic locks is different: battery calendar, condition of the door furniture, log collection, review of the credential list and control of the emergency keys.
Who configures it once we leave.
Here the client runs more of it than anywhere else, because the day-to-day is issuing credentials. But there is one thing they cannot afford to lose.
In a hotel, reception issues cards all day without calling anyone, and that works from the first shift. In a company, the joiners and leavers, the groups, the schedules and the permissions by door are run by the client's team, usually HR or IT, with security deciding who goes where.
What the client does not touch: initialising a new lock, changing the scheme of the installation, adding online doors or altering the integration. And there is something specific to this kind of system worth knowing: there is a key belonging to the installation itself, the one that makes your locks accept only your credentials. That is held in custody, documented and left in the client's name. Losing it is not an inconvenience: it is an expensive problem.
The training here is specific and short, and it is appreciated in writing: issuing and cancelling credentials, knowing how long a cancellation takes to bite on each type of door, changing a battery, opening with the emergency key and collecting the log from a lock. And the documentation: a map of the doors with their mode, the battery calendar and where the keys are.
Coming from something else.
Coming from a mechanical key, which is the most common case, the door is kept and sometimes the door furniture, and the master key suite disappears. There is a decision there that always gets forgotten: what is done about the keys that are out there, in the hands of people who should no longer have them. That is the problem you were called about, and it is only solved if the old cylinder is not left in place «just in case».
And the integration with an access platform already fitted, which is where you trip up: the manufacturer may call it certified and it normally works for distributing credentials and opening doors, but it does not give feature parity. You end up doing some things in one console and others in the other. That is said beforehand, tested on a mock-up and written into the certificate, because it is what the client will notice every week.
The other six in this group.
The other six are platforms: four cloud or hybrid, one for large buildings and one that comes from video. This one comes from the lock, and they often live side by side.
Get started
How many of your doors cannot be cabled?
That is the question that decides whether this is right for you. Tell us how many doors there are, what they are like —if any are fire doors, better still— and what system runs the perimeter today, and we will tell you what an electronic lock solves and what it does not.