My parents have one. Its pretty damn cool not having to worry about having your key with you. The downside that I noticed is that after time your fingertips start to "scrub" the top of the numbers in your combination, you see your pushing the same couple of buttons each time and not even touching the other ones. After awhile those buttons start to look a little different from the other ones, making it pretty easy to guess the combo. I dont think it offers an security advantage over traditional locks (if fact its probably weaker) but they are convenient.
Noone is ever going to try to defeat your lock unless it is the weakest point in accessing your home and unless you have a steel door and no windows, it isnt.
The suburban grade school my MIL is a teacher at has these crazy LCD touchscreen keypad locks where every time you key in the combination the numbers are in random positions to prevent that very thing from happening.
Of course, the other anser is simple, choose a combination that uses all number buttons once, so the wear is equal.
i.e. 2143987560
Not to hijack the thread, but did anyone see Mythbusters two weeks ago, where they defeated the biometric finger print lock?
They lifted the finger print off a CD case of the "mark" one of the technical assistants.
Then they dusted, taped, and transferred the print, and made a high-rez flatbed scan of it.
Then they blew it up onto acetate film, cleaned the lines up with a sharpie marker, reduced it again on the scanner.
Then they photo etched a copper circuit board using the acetate as a photo lithography template.
Then the etched copper was used to cast balistic gelatin fingerprints.
They worked& At least for this brand of lock, all the spy movie stuff about rubber fingerprints is TRUE. And this lock also sensed galvanic response, body temp, and pulse to be sure it was a "real finger"...
Then, after all that trouble, they took a simple paper laser print of the fingerprint,
licked it and even that worked. LOL!
Methinks the manufacturer of the "never been defeated lock" wasn't too happy...