Frequently Asked Questions

It is, on the same number and the same rates. The City and the District of North Vancouver are separate municipalities, and the area pages here cover both: most of Lonsdale sits in the City, while Lynn Valley, Lynnmour, Seymour, Deep Cove, Capilano, Norgate, Pemberton Heights and Edgemont Village sit in the District. That is not a courtesy extension of the map. It is most of the book.

What changes across the boundary is the driving, not the invoice. Lower and Central Lonsdale are short runs. Deep Cove, the top of Lynn Valley and the upper end of Capilano Road sit further out again, at the far end of the published windows. Each of those pages publishes the window that applies to it, so read the one for your own street rather than the figure at the top of this page.

The electronic ones. A fob reader, an intercom panel or an electronic latch that has genuinely stopped working is access-control equipment, and that is a different trade. The strata towers stepping up Lonsdale from the Quay run into this more than most, because a common entry there is fob, intercom and strike all wired together, and only one of those three is a lock.

The useful part is that the two fail in ways you can hear apart. If the reader chirps and the door still holds, something mechanical is winning: usually a closer pressing the leaf so hard the strike will not let go. If the reader does nothing at all, the fault is upstream of anything a locksmith carries. Describe which of those two happened and the call gets routed correctly before anyone is dispatched.

Because the unit being counted is the cylinder, not the door and not the address. That catches people out most often in the older Lynnmour townhomes, where a single front entrance can carry a passage latch and a deadbolt: two cylinders, two line items, before the back door has even come up in the conversation. A door running a knob lock on its own is the reverse case. There is no cylinder there worth re-pinning, so what you are quoted is a deadbolt going in.

Two things pull the total the other way. Doors booked into one visit cost less each than the same doors spread over separate call-outs, and a garage side entry or a suite door added while the technician is already standing there is far cheaper than it is as its own appointment. Count the cylinders before you phone and the number you are given on the call is the number that holds.

A standard car lockout on the North Shore runs $95–$160 for the lockout itself, and the total for your address is confirmed on the call before a van is sent. The vehicle and the hour decide which row of the table you sit on, rather than your postcode: a daytime opening with the keys in sight is the standard row, an after-hours or overnight opening has its own row, and a push-to-start car with a proximity fob is the dearest, because it takes more time and more tooling than a standard door. The row-by-row table, daytime through overnight, sits on the car lockout page. The figure is given before a van is dispatched, and it is the figure on the invoice unless the car turns out to be something the phone call could not have described, in which case you hear the revised number before any more work happens.

One distinction saves more wasted trips here than any other. Opening a car and making a key for a car are separate jobs with separate prices. If the key is lost or broken rather than sitting on the passenger seat, that is cutting and coding at the vehicle and it has its own table on the car key replacement page.

It sometimes does, and it is worth thirty seconds of checking before you commit to anything, particularly out at the eastern end where a trailhead or a boat-launch lockout can sit outside the radius some policies draw. Ask your insurer or your motoring club two things: whether a lockout is covered at all, and whether your address on Indian River Drive or at Cates Park is inside the area they will send someone to.

Ask a third thing while you have them: whether the cover stops at opening the door, because that is the line most programmes draw and the previous answer explains why it matters here. There is no arrangement between us and any insurer, roadside programme or dealership, so nothing you find out changes the answer on our side. If you are covered, use it. If the call comes back as a no, or as a yes with a wait attached to it, the number at the top of this page has not moved.

No, and Upper Lonsdale is the neighbourhood that proves it fastest. A short walk up there passes 1960s ranchers and split-levels, side-by-side semis, infill townhome stratas and newer detached builds that arrived with a keypad already on the front door, which is several generations of door prep inside one neighbourhood. Norgate does the opposite and stays still: the bungalows at its north end are largely wearing what the builder fitted in the 1950s. The newer custom builds up Capilano Road sit at the far end again, on entry doors built around multi-point mechanisms and European-profile cylinders.

So the useful question is never which brand is best. It is which one your door will physically take, what that particular door has to survive outdoors, and whether anything else on the property is already keyed to something worth matching. Those three get settled on site, which is why the van travels with a range rather than a favourite.

Because on three kinds of door here it decides whether the job closes in one visit. A restricted keyway is the first. Copies of those are cut by an authorized locksmith on written authorization rather than at a mall kiosk, which is exactly why the strata townhome complexes between Edgemont Boulevard and Montroyal Boulevard specify them, and blanks that have to be cut from scratch carry a lead time a Tuesday morning phone call can absorb easily and a Saturday night cannot.

Age is the second. Pemberton Heights has plenty of doors on hardware around fifty years old, and at that age a keyway is sometimes no longer available in fresh blanks at all, whatever condition the tumblers are in. The oldest Norgate cylinders raise the same question from the other direction, having been re-pinned past the point of doing it again. Mortise is the third. Plenty of the older strata buildings in Lower Lonsdale still run mortise cases, and the internal parts for those are not something any supply house keeps on a shelf, so the make is what decides whether a technician arrives with the component or with a temporary fix and a wait. A photo of the lock face sent through the contact page settles all three faster than a description does.

Somewhere lit, somewhere findable, and under cover where there is cover. At the Lynn Canyon Park entrance that means the covered area by the main entrance, which is worth the short walk, and you get a phone call as the van comes in rather than being left to spot it. In the Lonsdale Quay or Lynn Valley Centre parkades, stay with the vehicle and say which level you are on and which entrance you drove in through, because a technician holding those two details is not walking the structure floor by floor.

Trailhead lots take one detail more. The Quarry Rock lot off Panorama Drive fills on a Saturday and one parked car looks much like another from the road, so say what colour the car is and roughly which end of the lot it sits in; out there the technician is looking for a vehicle rather than a building. The streets branching off Deep Cove Road are tighter than a map makes them look, so a cross street is worth giving alongside the number. And if you move somewhere warmer, say which direction you went, because that is the one thing a phone call cannot guess at.

Yes, and you get it on the same call as the price rather than after you have committed. A dispatcher reads your address back first, because a mountain address given in the dark is easy to hear wrong, and then quotes the window that belongs to that area rather than an average taken across the whole map. Eleven areas on terrain this folded do not share one number honestly, so each area page carries its own.

If the window does not work for you, say so on the call. Planned work, a rekey before a tenancy or a lock change after a purchase, is booked into a slot instead, and that is usually a better use of a Tuesday than an emergency rate on a Saturday night.