ᐅ A Nuki smart lock on the front door can be convenient.

I don’t consider myself a smart home enthusiast, but I bought the Nuki 3.0 Pro because my wife and I really like the “phone in pocket, door unlocks” feature with my “new” Tesla (since last September). After a few software setup issues, which are now resolved, it works quite well.

I’m curious if others here are interested as well.

The note I want to make concerns the most important feature for me: the door should open automatically when I’m standing in front of it. This only works with this lock if I have been far enough away in between—and that means more than just a few meters (yards). Approaching the door with my hands full of luggage and having it unlock automatically is simply great. Unfortunately, just going next door isn’t enough. The neighboring houses are too close, and the Nuki doesn’t recognize that I was away. But after going shopping, it works 😀

I have the Nuki 2.0, the previous model, and I am very satisfied with its functionality.
However, I deliberately chose not to use the bridge that allows you to open the front door remotely via Wi-Fi. That felt a bit suspicious to me.
The same goes for the homing function with automatic opening. I prefer to perform this as a controlled and deliberate action.

But I really like the feature that automatically locks the door at a certain time.
Only the volume during the locking process could be quieter.

May I ask what happens, for example, if the internet, Wi-Fi, mobile phone fails, or if there is a blown fuse in the house? Is there a backup system or just a standard front door key?

The lock can be operated normally with the key. The Nuki is mounted from the inside onto the locking cylinder.

Front door key.
The Nuki can only be installed on a lock cylinder that can be opened from the outside when a key is inserted from the inside (because the key must always remain inside for the Nuki).
I especially like that the door opens by itself when I arrive home. It gives me a feeling of gratitude, even though I know no one is deliberately being kind to me.

I have been using Nuki since the first generation in my rental apartments and am completely satisfied. The original reason for buying it was that we kept forgetting to actually lock the door, not just close it behind us. Even when we are at home, we rarely use a key to lock the door from the inside.

Nuki fulfills this function 100%. There are many settings available, but over the years the “always lock door automatically after 30 minutes” setting has worked best for us. It always works and doesn’t cause any inconvenience.

The automatic door opening works most of the time (about 95%). If it doesn’t open (for whatever reason), it’s just a simple action on the phone or smartwatch (in my case, iPhone and Apple Watch). At home, this is perfect—walking from the elevator to the front door or up the stairs, the door opens at exactly the right moment, which is really great. I see a potential issue for our new house, which I will come back to below.

Now first to you @ateliersiegel. Your issue with the door not opening when you were at the neighbor’s is not a malfunction; it’s intentional because otherwise Nuki would always open whenever you walked by with your Bluetooth device. You can set this detection range to a minimum of 100 meters (330 feet) in the expert settings under “Geofence Size.”

Here is the problem I foresee for us. In our new house, we are planning a carport as a covered entrance. Since Nuki reliably unlocks the door as soon as Bluetooth is detected, it will open the door (retract the latch) as soon as I drive into the carport. In the app, the maximum time you can set the latch to stay retracted is 30 seconds, which means the door will be closed—not locked again—by the time I get out of the car and walk to the door.

If there is no technical reason to limit this time (for example, motor overheating from holding the latch too long), it might be worth discussing this with Nuki support. They might consider extending this time and giving users more control. Their support is excellent, they respond quickly and often implement user feedback (several of my requests have been implemented, probably not just because of me 🙂).

There are certainly situations where Nuki can’t perform perfectly, but it should work for most cases and scenarios.

I also have an example that doesn’t work, but it’s not Nuki’s fault. A friend has to drive down a side street that is at most 4 meters (13 feet) wide, past the house to reach his parking space. This means Nuki detects his Bluetooth device as he drives by, retracts the latch, but by the time he reaches the front door, the door is already closed again. Because of the setting described earlier—intentionally designed this way—Auto Unlock only works once until you leave your geofence again. So he cannot use it this way.

At first, his door would remain wide open every time he walked to the house after parking the car. We quickly realized that the door was set up incorrectly in this case and that it was notable when the latch was retracted (which could be desired in some situations). Adjusting the door setup fixed this quickly, and initially he thought this would allow him to use Nuki’s automatic door unlocking in practice. But over time this turned out to be impractical in his case (stray cats inside the house, forgetting to buy something and leaving again with the door open all the time, etc.).

Nuki has many very useful features, but it simply cannot cover every situation and requirement. Everyone should carefully consider their own needs and decide whether it makes sense for them.

P.S.: No, I am not a Nuki employee, just a satisfied user 🙂.