The clocks go back on 25 October. Here is the ten-minute check on your front door.

On Sunday 25 October the clocks go back an hour, and Manchester goes dark before most people have finished work. Nothing about your door changes that weekend. What changes is how many hours a day it is standing in the dark.

This is the check we would run on our own front doors before that happens. It takes about ten minutes, most of it is free, and the expensive-sounding parts are usually the ones that turn out to be fine.

Start here, because it is the one that catches the most people and it costs nothing to find out.

Pull your door shut without lifting the handle and without turning the key. Now push it. If it gives, your door is latched — resting on a small spring catch — rather than locked. On a uPVC or composite door the real locking happens when you lift the handle and turn the key, which throws the hooks and bolts down the edge of the door into the frame.

Plenty of people have lived somewhere for years assuming a closed door was a locked one. Test it once and you will know.

Open the door and look along its edge. You should see the mechanism: usually two or three hooks or mushroom-shaped bolts, plus the latch and often a deadbolt. That strip of metal is what actually holds your door shut, and it is worth knowing what yours has.

Lift the handle with the door open and watch them come out. If anything sticks, grinds, or only comes part way, that is the thing to fix first — long before anybody talks to you about upgrading a lock.

The cylinder is the barrel your key goes into. On a uPVC or composite door it is the part that gets attacked, so its rating matters more than almost anything else on the door.

Look at the face of it, around the keyhole. A good one will be marked — three stars, or a diamond, or both. Those are the TS007 3-star and Sold Secure Diamond marks, and they mean the cylinder has been independently tested against snapping, drilling, picking and bumping rather than just described that way on the box.

No marking at all is worth doing something about. It is also one of the cheapest meaningful upgrades there is — a rated cylinder and half an hour, and the rest of the door stays exactly as it is.

If you find yourself lifting, leaning on or shouldering the door to get the handle up, the door has dropped on its hinges or the frame has moved. Very common on doors more than a few years old, and very easy to live with without noticing.

It matters for two reasons. A door fighting its frame wears the mechanism out, and — more to the point in October — a door that is annoying to lock properly is a door that sometimes does not get locked properly.

Usually this is an adjustment rather than a replacement. Worth saying, because a dropped door is often quoted as a new door.

Not the keys you can find. The keys that exist.

Previous tenants. The people who did the kitchen. A cleaner you no longer use. Whoever lived there before you. Someone you would rather did not. A key takes minutes and a few pounds to copy, and the original tells you nothing about whether it happened.

If that list is longer than you are comfortable with, changing the cylinder resets it — and it is the same job as upgrading an unrated one in point three, so the two are worth doing together.

Front doors get the attention. Back doors, side gates, garage doors and patio doors are usually older, weaker, and out of sight of the street — which is the whole point from the wrong person's perspective.

Run the same checks. In our experience the back door is where the unrated cylinder and the stiff mechanism usually turn up.

Honestly? Points one to six have nothing to do with them, and we would rather you sorted those first. A smart lock on a door that does not shut properly is a more convenient way to operate a problem.

Where they earn their place is point one. A smart lock can throw the bolts itself a few seconds after the door closes, every single time, whether or not anyone remembered — which quietly removes the most common way homes are actually entered. It also means you can hand access to somebody and take it back again without cutting a key you can never get back, which is point five solved permanently rather than once.

And on most of our installs the rated cylinder you already have stays exactly where it is. The smart lock turns it for you from the inside; the outside of your door does not change.

Send us a photo of the edge of your door with it open, and a photo of the cylinder face, and we will tell you what you have got and what it is rated to. No charge and no obligation — it takes us a minute to read and it saves you guessing.

If it turns out you need nothing, we will tell you that too. Most of the doors we look at in autumn need an adjustment and a cylinder, not a new door and not a new lock.

Send us a photo, or have a look at how we work first.