Focus on Finish for your “Home Sweet Secure Home”
No matter where you live, unpredictable summer weather is always a possibility. This time of year, heat waves, hurricanes along the east coast, tornadoes in the Midwest and monsoons and dust storms in the desert areas of the southwest cause damage to homes across the country. Making sure your house is best suited to stand up to these harsh conditions is something any responsible homeowner must consider. A great place to start is with the vital hardware used on your doors, such as doorknobs, handles and deadbolts. Severe weather events can cause damage to these products in the form of discoloration or corrosion. Luckily, the BHMA® Certified Secure Home™ label’s Finish rating can help you find products that are rigorously tested for this precise reason.
Finish is the outer coating or texture on your handle, knob, or lock designed to protect it from elemental damage. The quality of a product’s finish is often an accurate measurement of how well your door hardware can endure various conditions. That’s why the finish rating on the BHMA Secure Home label is such a useful tool when searching for something new. The Secure Home label can be found on the packaging or online description of any product certified by BHMA, making it easy to identify for any prospective buyer. Once you have found the label, you can find the finish rating right below the other two performance categories, security and durability.
Each product certified by BHMA receives a grade of Good (C), Better (B), or Best (A) in each of the three categories based on its performance during the testing process. With the Secure Home label, homeowners can know that any product that is certified, no matter what the rating, has been rigorously tested to ANSI/BHMA performance standards.
For more information on the Secure Home label and our high-performance testing process, visit the Resources and FAQ page here or the Learning About the Label page here.