Manhattan Union Office — Front Door Access Control Failure

01 · The situation

A union organization in a Manhattan office building called us with an urgent problem: the card reader on their front door had stopped working, and the door was staying unlocked. With staff and visitors coming and going all day, an open front door in a shared office building is a serious security exposure — anyone could walk in.

02 · What we weighed

On-site, we found that the locks, the request-to-exit button, and the card reader itself had no power and weren't responding to fobs at all. In the building's data room, the picture became clearer. The control board was sending power out to the circuit, but the door's wiring had every device — locks, REX, sensor, and reader — tied onto a single shared circuit. That setup left the system exposed to power surges and repeat failures, and the controller running the circuit had stopped sending data altogether. Complicating the repair: the existing wiring was disorganized, with split circuits and no labeling, so before we could fix anything we had to trace each wire back to its device by hand. On top of that, the customer had no working access to their own access control software — they couldn't manage the door themselves even when it was running.

03 · The solution

We rewired the front door circuit from the ground up, separating every device — locks, REX, sensor, and reader — onto its own line so a surge or fault on one component can't take down the rest. We replaced the failed devices on the circuit and installed a new IP-based access control system that can be managed remotely, on a dedicated network built specifically for the front door.

04 · The outcome

The front door is secure and back under control. Employees have reliable access again, and the union's IT director can now manage permissions and unlock the door remotely — from anywhere — instead of being locked out of their own system. The office is secure, and the access control setup is one they can actually maintain going forward.