This is why I hate some cocktail parties. If you 'confess' to being a locksmith you get asked by well meaning people that question in various wordings. The problem is there is no easy answer.
I guess I should start with a simple one. Every door on your house should have a deadbolt with a 1 inch bolt throw. This means if you open the door and extend the bolt it should extend 1 inch or 2.5 cm out of the door. Locking knobsets do not count for home security any more and possibly never did. Deadbolts count in part because that is what your insurance agent asks for door locks.
What gets more complex and yet just as much a problem is what door you have to lock up. I have put a deadbolt into a door in a 1928 house. The wood AT the edge was GREAT. However, set into the middle of the door were floating panels. They allowed for expansion and contraction in heat and humidity. The problem is they were clearly an 1/8 of an inch thick or about 3 mm. You could punch through them much like glass. Is that door more secure now? It does meet the insurance company requirement.
Directly beside the deadbolt is the strike or hole which the bolt moves into when the door is closed. This is a metal square screwed into the frame. And sometimes it is more screwed and sometimes it is you who is getting screwed. Let me explain. At the top end, the strike is held into a metal frame filled with concrete. However most houses have wooden doors and frames and the strike you see is held by wood screws. Some have 4 screws with two long ones going into the wood frame of the house and two smaller screws just holding the strike flat. (Door frames are made of soft woods so they can be fit into position during construction and they take paint nicely. Door frames are usually less than one inch or 2.5 cm thick with a small air gap before you encounter the wood frame of the house.) At the worst, the strike is held by two small wood screws which only grab the soft door frame. I have seen new construction where this little plate was with the locks should they be installed in metal frames. However, the developer wanted to move fast and these go on FAST. So the people who bought the condo had a good look on a good door but a weak strike. (They would have thrown out the good strike which came with the deadbolts.)
Another day, windows!
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The contents of this post are released for non-profit or educational use in whole or in part provided this statement and the attribution below are kept attached.
Laux Myth ... Thoughts From a Locksmith
By MartinB, Found @ http://lauxmyth.blogspot.com/
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