A wicket door is a small pedestrian door built into a larger industrial door — usually a roller shutter or sectional overhead door.
You see them quite often in commercial buildings. During working hours, the main roller shutter can be fully opened for deliveries. At other times, people can simply walk through the small wicket door without operating the entire shutter.
In the previous chapter, I explained my problem. I originally hoped to use a TTLock keypad to open the main roller shutter directly.
Customer enters PIN.
Roller shutter opens.
Self storage dream continues.
Unfortunately, the builder quickly poured cold water on that idea. Operating roller shutters that way is considered unsafe under UK safety requirements.
So the wicket door became the obvious compromise.
Customers could enter through the small door safely. The main roller shutter could still be opened by a normal key switch when necessary — for example, when someone had a lot of goods to move in.
That sounded sensible.
Then came the next problem.
The Smart Lock That Nobody Planned For
The issue was painfully simple: every wicket door I found in the UK always has an ordinary mortice lock fitted.
Perfectly fine for a traditional warehouse.
Not very useful for a humanless self storage facility.
I even asked the roller shutter supplier not to include any lock at all, thinking I could fit my own smart lock later.
The answer was no.
They told me the lock was standard, and they had to supply it with one.
This is one of those small moments that reveals a much bigger problem.
In the UK — and in many other developed countries — labour costs are so high that many companies have stopped meaningfully integrating new technology into their products. Redesigning, testing, certifying, and supporting upgraded hardware is expensive. So many companies simply keep selling the same basic hardware, because it still works well enough for most customers.
Over time, that creates a vicious circle.
Fewer upgraded products means fewer engineering projects.
Fewer engineering projects means fewer engineering jobs.
Fewer engineering jobs means more young people move into finance, law, accounting, or other service sectors.
And with fewer engineers available, the physical hardware gets upgraded even more slowly.
Once that cycle starts, it is not easily reversed.
So the infrastructure often feels oddly outdated.
You see it everywhere.
The software may look modern.
The website may look modern.
The sales brochure may look modern.
But underneath, the hardware is often based on ideas from decades ago.
I saw the same pattern repeatedly in the UK self storage industry. The management software had improved, but many of the underlying systems — access control, intercoms, security monitoring, gate control — still felt like they came from another era.
It became one of the recurring themes of my BSS journey:
The future is available.
It just doesn’t always fit the door.
Two Realities, One Door
So I was stuck between two realities.
First, I could not safely rely on cloud control to operate the main roller shutter directly.
Second, there was no wicket door on the market that came with a built-in smart lock — or even seemed designed with one in mind.
In other words, the safe solution was not smart, and the smart solution was not available.
By this stage, I had learned that when the market refuses to offer the thing you need, you either give up or make something awkward yourself.
So I chose the awkward option.
After the roller shutter with wicket door was installed, I spent two weekends removing the standard mortice lock and fitting a TTLock smart mortice lock in its place.
It was not elegant.
It was not quick.
And it was definitely not something the supplier had designed for.
But eventually, it worked.
The wicket door could now be opened by customer PIN, managed remotely through TTLock, and connected back to our access control system.
For the first time, the entrance started to look like something that could support a genuinely humanless self storage operation.
The Three-Layer Access System
In the end, the access control for Birmingham Self Storage became a three-layer system.
Layer 1: Wicket door with TTLock smart mortice lock
Customers can use their PIN to enter the building safely without operating the roller shutter.
Layer 2: Keysafe for the roller shutter key
If customers have a large number of items to move in, they can access the roller shutter key and open the main shutter through the normal key switch. Not glamorous, but practical and safe.
Layer 3: Automatic electric sliding doors with TTLock keypad
Once inside, customers pass through the automatic sliding doors using another TTLock-controlled access point.
It was not the single sleek solution I originally imagined.
But it was better.
It respected safety requirements, gave customers practical access, and still allowed the system to manage permissions automatically.
Sometimes, in a small business, progress does not look like a perfect design.
It looks like three imperfect solutions working together just well enough.
I allowed myself to feel pleased.
Then the lighting problem came back to haunt me.
The smart cameras could detect movement.
The smart switches could turn lights on.
The cloud logic could connect them.
But sometimes there was a delay.
Sometimes 10 seconds.
Sometimes 30 seconds.
Occasionally, even longer.
At home, this was annoying.
In a self storage facility, it was dangerous.
Imagine a customer walking into a dark corridor, carrying boxes, waiting for the lights to wake up because the cloud was taking its time.
That was not a minor inconvenience.
That was a safety concern.
After everything I had built, I suddenly realised the whole automation dream still depended on something fragile:
the internet.
If the system needed the cloud every time someone moved, then the building was only as smart as its connection.
I needed the lights to react instantly.
Which meant I needed something different.
Next Chapter: Node-RED — Controlling IoT Devices Without the Internet
free to follow my BSS journey — a real, unfiltered account of building an independent self-storage business in the UK, one problem, mistake, and hard-won solution at a time.
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