Frequently Asked Questions

The figure to plan around is the one dispatch gives you on the call, based on where the nearest technician is, because three known things move it. Lougheed Highway is heavy at the afternoon peak, and the River Springs gate is reached off that corridor, which is why a River Springs call at that hour is quoted with the traffic in mind. United Boulevard stacks near the highway interchange at the same hours, and that is the approach to Cape Horn, quoted the same way. And if you are calling from the upper Burke Mountain streets in winter, tell us what the road is actually like, because that is the one thing dispatch cannot see from down here and it decides whether the estimate you get is worth anything.

Yes, any hour, any day. The version of that call we take most often is not a house at all. It is a suite in one of the towers at Burquitlam or around Lafarge Lake, after the last train, with the keys on the wrong side of the door and the only alternative being to wake a property manager at midnight for a favour nobody enjoys asking for. More people live behind each door along that corridor, which is why the calls per block run higher there than on a street of detached houses. Give the building address and the suite number and a technician is sent out from Coquitlam Centre.

Somewhere lit, and somewhere you can be found. Two Coquitlam situations are worth planning for. The south and east edges of Mundy Park are quiet enough after dark that a locked door there feels more isolating than it really is, so move to the nearest lit corner and tell us which one. In a parkade the problem is signal rather than light: a lower level often will not hold a call, so walk up toward an exit, text from there, and the technician confirms the bay on approach. The one thing not to do is work at the cylinder yourself. A chewed plug turns a lock that would have been picked open into one that needs replacing.

Usually, and that holds whether or not you still have a key, because a rekey does not depend on one either. The cylinder gets picked or impressioned, and drilling is what happens when neither of those works rather than what happens first. The qualifier here is age. On the pre-war streets around Laval Square and on the older Cape Horn blocks above the industrial flat, what sits in the door may be a mortise body rather than a modern cylinder, and some of those are worn past saving. If that is what a technician finds, you hear it, and what replacing it involves, before anything is cut.

The deadbolt on your own suite door, and the cylinder on your storage locker if it takes a key. Not the fob system. Lobbies, parkades, elevators and amenity rooms run on credentials the strata corporation or property manager issues and cancels, so a replacement fob is a request to the building rather than a call here. We work from the suite door inward. Worth knowing while a technician is already in the building: most keyed lockers can be brought onto the same key as the suite in the same visit, which is one fewer key to carry for a cage you open twice a year.

On the newer stock, almost always. Burke Mountain is nearly all 2010s and 2020s construction, and a battery-powered smart deadbolt fits standard door prep, so on those doors it is hardware swapped for hardware. Suites around the Town Centre and Burquitlam are generally the same story. The old end of the city gets measured first: bores on some Maillardville and Austin Heights doors are not the standard 2-1/8 inches, so the door decides the model rather than the box it came in. We fit Schlage Encode, Yale Assure and August, and the mechanical key that ships with them is cut and tested before anyone leaves, since the night the battery dies is a poor time to find out it never was. On a strata door, ask your council before the hardware is bought.

Only with permission, and it is far easier to arrange while the call is happening than once a technician is sitting at the entrance. If you have the code, give it to dispatch. If you do not, somebody who can authorize entry has to, a resident or the strata manager, and that gets settled on the phone before anyone drives out. The gate is often open through daylight hours, which is exactly why this catches people at night. Once a van is through, stay on the line: the street layout inside does not render usefully in a mapping app, and two sentences of directions beat watching headlights circle.

Four parts of Coquitlam do this, each with its own fix. Maillardville's oldest streets do not line up with what the apps assume, so the nearest intersection is worth more to us than the civic number. The cul-de-sacs backing onto Mundy Park route badly and often take longer to drive than the map's distance implies, so again, house number plus nearest cross street. On the steep upper streets of Eagle Ridge, set-back entrances and shared driveways make a dropped pin unreliable. And along United Boulevard several warehouse blocks share one exterior address, so the unit number is the part that matters. Austin Heights, by contrast, is a regular grid and needs none of this.

A standard residential lockout runs $95–$160 for the lockout itself, and where it lands inside that follows the lock type, the hour and where in Coquitlam you are. That range is where most of them land rather than a cap on the job. Nights, weekends and holidays carry an after-hours rate, and a high-security or smart-lock door is a longer job than a standard deadbolt, so either one can price above the range; the published bands for both are in the table on the emergency locksmith page. Whichever yours is, the total for your address is confirmed on the call before a van is dispatched rather than at the door once the job is done. What a Burke Mountain driveway changes in winter is the arrival time rather than the price, and dispatch tells you that on the call. Car keys and commercial work have their own bands, set out on those pages.

Most jobs do, since the van carries picks, a key cutting machine, blanks for the common profiles and the usual replacement hardware. Three things are worth flagging when you book. Restricted keyways, the Medeco, Mul-T-Lock and Abloy end of the market that turns up around the golf course perimeter on Westwood Plateau and in River Springs, can be serviced on site, but blanks that have to come from the factory carry a lead time, so name the brand on the call. A multi-point mechanism on one of the heavy River Springs front doors can be adjusted in the field, while replacing the mechanism outright is quoted on its own and is sometimes more than a mobile visit can close. And a mortise body that has failed rather than gone stiff may need a part, which is usually same or next day rather than same hour.

On site, once the job is done and you have tried the key yourself. Credit and debit cards, cash or e-transfer, and the same list applies to a car key as to a deadbolt. A standard service call takes no deposit, while a large commercial or multi-door project may be quoted with a partial deposit agreed in writing beforehand. If you would rather supply your own hardware, a fob bought online for instance, it gets inspected first and you are told honestly whether it will program before any time is charged against it. A fob we supply comes with the manufacturer's warranty passed through to you, and our own labour is covered if the work fails.

Three things, and they get checked before a blade goes near the cutter: the vehicle registration, your photo ID, and a VIN visible on the dash. The VIN is read off the car in front of the technician rather than taken from the booking, and that is the part worth understanding, because the same check is what makes it safe for us to wipe a key or fob you have lost out of the vehicle's memory while we are standing there. An address that no longer matches between your licence and the registration does not stop the job.

Mainstream platforms are routine and the make list is set out on the car key replacement page. The edges are the useful part of this answer. BMW, Audi and Mercedes depend on the model year, so those get checked on the phone rather than promised on a web page. A work truck or a cargo van is not the limitation people expect it to be. Motorcycles are the real gap: what is possible is more limited and depends on the brand, so ask on the phone before you book one in. As for where, it all happens beside the car, whether that is a driveway on Ranch Park Way or a level under the mall parkade.

Yes. The technician who comes to your door works under BC Security Worker Licence E106677, and liability insurance covers the job whether it is residential, commercial or automotive. Strata councils and commercial property managers sometimes want that on file before a visit, and it can go over by email ahead of the appointment. Strata work leaves a record at the other end too: every cylinder keyed is documented and a completion record goes back for the building's file, which is what a council needs the first time somebody asks which suites were done and when.

The pattern barely varies. A lockout is quoted at $15–$35 over the phone, a headline number rather than a price for the work. On arrival the job becomes "high security" or "more complex than it sounded", and the bill is $300–$600 before the technician leaves. The tells all sit before that point: no licence number when you ask for one, no firm figure for the job as you have described it, and a company name that shifts depending on which listing you called.

Against that, here is what is checkable on this page. The licence number is in the answer above. The figure for your job is agreed on the call, and no Coquitlam address gets handed to another company on our behalf, so the person at your door works here. If you want a quote repeated back or confirmed before you commit, call 604-259-6771 and ask.