Kingston upon Thames, South West London · KT1
Security for HMOs and shared houses in Kingston upon Thames
Multiple unrelated occupiers, frequent turnover, and a front door used by people who each hold a key. This page works through the entry points that matter on HMOs and shared houses and what is worth fitting because of them.
- Property type: HMOs and shared houses
- Lead service: access control
- Most exposed point: Front door with keys that have circulated through past tenancies
Most exposed
Front door with keys that have circulated through past tenancies
Fit first
Room door hardware appropriate to a shared house
Constraint
Fire safety governs everything here: locks on escape routes must open from the inside without a key, and any electrically held door has to release on fire alarm activation.
The routes that get tried
The obvious opening is seldom the one used on HMOs and shared houses.
- Front door with keys that have circulated through past tenancies
- Individual room doors
What earns its place here
- Room door hardware appropriate to a shared house
- Occupiers need to secure their own room without compromising escape from the building.
- Camera limited to the external entrance
- Records who comes and goes without recording tenants living their lives indoors.
The exposure window
Multiple unrelated occupiers, frequent turnover, and a front door used by people who each hold a key.
The oversight we are called back to
A camera in the shared kitchen, which is almost never defensible and reliably produces a complaint.
The weak points, and why they matter
- Communal-area privacy
- Cameras in shared kitchens and hallways record tenants at home, which is intrusive and hard to justify.
- Escape routes
- Any lock added to a shared house has to release on the escape route without a key.
Kingston upon Thames specifics
In Kingston upon Thames (KT1) we work regularly around Richmond Road and Clarence Street. Kingston station and the A308 / A3.
Considering wireless CCTV systems here
Cameras that transmit video to the recorder over Wi-Fi rather than a network cable, avoiding the need to run cabling to each camera position.
- Retrofitting cameras onto an existing decorated building
- Where it stops being the right answer: congested wireless networks can affect multiple cameras' streaming quality simultaneously.
A practical limit worth knowing first
- Fire safety governs everything here: locks on escape routes must open from the inside without a key, and any electrically held door has to release on fire alarm activation.
Years three to five: lost alarm engineer or master code
Previous installer unreachable, that is one of the more common calls once a system has been in for a few years.
Before booking anyone, do not keep trying codes, repeated failures can lock the keypad. Insist codes are documented at handover. It is your system; you should be able to change installer without changing hardware.
Kingston upon Thames questions we get asked
Security for HMOs and shared houses in Kingston upon Thames
Local detail for Kingston upon Thames
- Faults diagnosed before parts are ordered
- Cabling, containment and making good carried out in-house
- Quotations itemised so each part can be questioned
Placement beats specification
Tell us what you want to be alerted to while you are away and we will build the design backwards from that.
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