[Written By Tony Marino, External Partner]
Count the batteries in your house. Not the spare AAs in the junk drawer, the ones actually doing a job. Smoke detectors, the thermostat, door and window sensors, motion sensors, remotes, the video doorbell, the keyboard and mouse on your desk. For a lot of homes, the front door lock is on that list too, and it’s the one that matters most when it runs out.
The smart home was sold on less hassle. Lights that shut themselves off, a door that unlocks as you walk up. What nobody printed on the box is the maintenance schedule that comes with it. Every device that went wireless to make installation easy now wants a battery swap or a charging cable on its own timeline, and the low-battery warning always seems to show up at the worst possible moment.
Feature creep makes it worse. A basic keypad deadbolt with no radio can go a long time on a set of AAs. Add Wi-Fi so you can check it from your phone, a 3D camera for face recognition and a fingerprint reader, and the power budget starts to look more like a phone’s than a lock’s.
The industry’s answer is ambient power: let devices collect the energy that’s already around them. It has been creeping into products for years. Samsung’s TV remotes recharge from room light. Logitech has sold a solar keyboard for more than a decade. Urbanista built a light-harvesting strip into a headband so its headphones top themselves up on a walk.
The front door is the hard case. Entryways sit under porch roofs, face the wrong direction or spend most of the day in shade, which is exactly where conventional silicon solar cells fall off. That’s the problem a newer material, perovskite, is being aimed at. Perovskite cells keep producing in weak and indirect light, and they can be made thin enough to sit right on the face of a device.
DESLOC, a smart lock brand backed by parent company DESMAN and its 17 years of making locks, built its V150 Plus around that idea. The lock has a 4.8-inch perovskite panel on its front that starts charging at about 300 lux, roughly the light on a covered porch on an overcast day, and feeds a 10,000mAh removable battery. To find out why a lock company is betting on solar, and what it took to make it work in the shade, we talked with Mark Dong, CEO and Founder of DESLOC.
Q&A with DESLOC CEO Mark Dong
Smart locks have been adding features for a decade. Why focus on power now?
Because every feature we add costs energy, and the homeowner is the one who pays for it. Face recognition, Wi-Fi, a bigger screen: each one makes the lock more convenient to use and less convenient to own. We kept hearing the same thing from users. They love the features and they hate the low-battery alert. At some point battery life stops being a spec and becomes the whole experience.
Solar locks already exist. What’s different about putting perovskite on a front door?
Most solar locks use conventional panels that do well in direct sun. Very few front doors get direct sun for long. They’re under an overhang, they face north or there’s a tree in the way. Perovskite keeps producing in low and indirect light, so we could design for the door people actually have. Ours starts charging at about 300 lux, which is a covered porch on a gray day.
Is the battery still doing the heavy lifting?
The battery is the foundation. It’s 10,000mAh and removable, and on its own it can last up to eight months with no solar input at all in typical US environmental conditions. Of course, performance varies depending on available ambient light at the install location. The solar panel’s job is to keep topping it off so you charge far less often. The part nobody sees is the battery management system, which decides how to split solar and stored power across standby, face recognition, fingerprint reads and Wi-Fi. A panel without that is mostly decoration.
How do you prove that to a skeptical buyer?
Two ways. First, we had it tested independently. TÜV Rheinland evaluated the lock under its 2 PfG 3330 specification, which asks whether the energy harvested in low light can keep up with daily use: standby, face and fingerprint unlocks, remote control. Second, we show the data. The app shows battery level, charging status and how much light the lock collected each day, so you don’t have to take our word for it.
Winter is coming. What happens on the shortest, darkest days?
Less light means less harvest, and we’re upfront about that. Winter shifts more of the work to the battery, which is why we sized it the way we did. The lock is also built to operate from -22°F to 158°F, so cold snaps and summer heat on a dark door are both part of the design brief.
Did convenience have to take a back seat to saving power?
No, and that was the point. The V150 Plus recognizes your face as you walk up, even at night, so you can get in with your hands full. The curved fingerprint sensor reads wet, dry and worn prints. Face and fingerprint data stay on the lock instead of in the cloud. Solar is what lets us keep all of that switched on without asking more of the owner.
Where does ambient power go next?
Anywhere at the edge of the home that’s hard to reach with a wire: sensors, outdoor cameras, doorbells. We’d also like to see battery life become a headline spec across the industry, measured in real conditions and verified by someone independent. Homeowners shouldn’t have to find out how long something lasts by waiting for it to die.
Ambient power won’t clear every battery out of the smart home, at least not yet. But the direction is hard to miss. The next round of connected devices will be judged less on what they can do and more on how little they ask of you to keep doing it.
The DESLOC V150 Plus is sold at desloc.com and amazon.com.
