Security Grilles

Often, and it is worth checking before you order anything. Conservation areas and listed buildings restrict what can be added to a front elevation, external shutters on shopfronts frequently need planning consent, and if you are a leaseholder your lease may require the freeholder's agreement. Internal grilles are generally far less contentious than external ones, which is one reason we suggest them first.

It is the commonest worry and a fair one. Retractable grilles fold back into a stack against the reveal so the window is clear all day, which is quite different to living behind fixed bars. Powder coating in a colour that matches the frame helps enormously. For most homes we would fit retractable and only use fixed bars where an opening genuinely is never used.

It must be, wherever the opening forms part of an escape route, and that means a thumbturn or quick-release catch rather than a key. This is most critical in basement and lower-ground flats. We specify internal release as standard on habitable rooms, and where a window is a room's only alternative exit we will ask you to confirm the arrangement with building control or your fire officer, because we are locksmiths rather than fire safety assessors.

A grille is an open barrier you can see through, which keeps a shopfront visible at night and lets light into a flat. A shutter is a solid or perforated curtain that closes the opening completely, giving more privacy and weather protection but a blank frontage. Many high streets prefer or require open grilles for exactly that reason, so it is worth checking locally before choosing.

It can, particularly on ground-floor and basement properties and on commercial units, but no insurer commits to that in advance and we cannot promise it. What we can do is give you an itemised invoice naming what was fitted and where, which is what an insurer asks for. Where a policy already specifies grilles as a condition, tell us the wording and we will fit to it.

Usually. Shutter and grille locks sit at ground level taking road grit, rain and salt every day, so they seize far sooner than a door lock does. Cleaning, freeing and relubricating fixes a good proportion of them, and where the lock has genuinely gone the barrel or the whole lock can be changed without touching the shutter itself.

Yes, and internally is often the better answer. An internal grille avoids planning and conservation issues almost entirely, is protected from weather so it lasts longer and runs more smoothly, and cannot be attacked from the street. The trade-off is that it sits inside your window reveal, so it is more visible from within the room.

Those belong to the freeholder or the managing agent rather than to you, so they have to authorise the work. We are happy to survey, explain what would suit and put it in writing for you to pass on, which usually moves the conversation along faster than a resident describing it second-hand at an AGM.

Regularly, and they are among the most worthwhile places to have them, because a light well gives someone cover to work in unseen. The two things that decide the job are the state of the brickwork for fixings and whether the basement has a window that must stay usable as an exit. Both are established on the survey.

A survey takes half an hour or so. Fabrication to size means a gap of a week or two before fitting, depending on the specification. The installation itself is usually a half day for a single opening and a full day for a shopfront, with more where fixings need resin anchors into poor masonry.

They are made to size, so an accurate figure needs the opening measured. We will give you the basis of the cost on the phone once we know the type of opening, roughly how wide it is and whether you want retractable or fixed, then confirm it in writing after the survey. Nothing is ordered until you have that figure.