Entry door lock sets replaced

Pic of corroded door lock mechanism (closeup)

Pic of corroded door lock mechanism

Why am I writing about our entry door locks? We’ve had problems with our entry door locks every winter. They freeze up and it’s impossible to get the key in the key hole. Now they are so corroded inside that the lock mechanism barely works the rest of the year. They are less than 3 years old. I was surprised to see the amount of corrosion inside.

I’ve spoken to a few people about our frozen door locks in the winter. The issue seems to be that the house is so tight, that warm moist air inside the house only has one place to get out, through the key holes. One other consideration. Our ERV is set by default to produce a very small increase in internal air pressure. I believe their thought is that you want to be pushing clean air out the leaks, rather than pulling unconditioned air in. But I believe this may be one of the sources of our problem.

I’ve installed new door entry sets and will be setting the ERV to fully balanced to see if this solves our problem this winter.

I haven’t seen anyone else mention this problem, so I thought I would post here and see if anyone else with a passivhaus-level tight home has had this experience.  Please comment below if you have, and what you did to fix it.

Update January 2017

lockset-2014

The original lock sets were manufactured by Schlage. The new one are from Kwikset. I like the style better and the push button lock better than the turn mechanism. They seem to be holding up well, but as I mention in the comment below, we now have an HRV which lowers the amount of moisture in the air in the winter. We also haven’t seen the same cold temperatures that we did in the first 3 years.