August Wi-Fi Smart Lock review: six years of August, and what my Home Assistant logs say

Disclosure: I bought both of my August locks with my own money. August didn’t send them. There are no affiliate links in this post. How I review

Short version: August has been on my front door since 2020: first a Smart Lock Pro with the Connect bridge, then the Wi-Fi Smart Lock (4th generation) since late 2021. It’s one of the most-used devices in my house, and the battery life has beaten August’s own claim. I liked the first one enough to buy the second.

How it fits on the door

The August is a retrofit lock. It replaces only the inside thumb-turn of your existing deadbolt, so the outside of the door looks the same and your old keys still work. That matters if you rent, or if you just don’t want to rekey the house. The 4th-gen model has Wi-Fi built in, so unlike my older Pro, it doesn’t need a separate bridge plugged in nearby. It also ships with DoorSense, a small sensor that tells the lock whether the door is actually closed.

What ten days of data says

The lock reports into Home Assistant, which keeps a log of every change. Over the last ten days:

• About 90 lock-and-unlock cycles, roughly nine a day. This lock earns its keep.
• Most of that was by hand. The bulk of the activity was someone turning the thumb-turn on the inside, with the app and Auto-Lock filling in the rest. A smart lock that still works perfectly well as a plain lock is underrated.
• Auto-Lock does its job. It shows up a handful of times in the log, catching the times nobody turned the lock by hand.

Battery life: better than advertised

August says the two CR123 batteries last up to three months. Over the same ten days, my battery dropped from 41% to 34%, at roughly nine cycles a day. If that rate holds, a fresh set lasts somewhere around four to five months in my house. That’s a projection from ten days of data, not a lab test, but it’s comfortably ahead of the claim.

The catch: CR123s aren’t the batteries you have in a kitchen drawer. Keep a spare pair around. The app warns you when it’s low, but the store won’t always have them.

In Home Assistant

Home Assistant’s August integration gives me the lock itself, a door sensor from DoorSense, the battery level, and an “operator” sensor that reports how the lock last moved: by hand, by Auto-Lock, or from the app. It’s a cloud integration, so it depends on August’s servers rather than running fully locally. For a front door that’s the trade-off I’d point out first. Also note that Home Assistant now points users of the newer Yale Home app to its Yale integration instead, so check which app your lock uses before you set it up.

What I’d want you to know before buying

• It’s cloud-dependent for remote control and Home Assistant. If local-only control is a hard requirement, look at a Z-Wave or Matter lock instead.
• Stock comes and goes. When I checked August’s own store this month, the Wi-Fi Smart Lock showed as out of stock, so compare prices and availability before you commit.
• Budget for CR123 batteries. See above.

Verdict

Six years and two generations in, August is still on my door. It installs without touching the outside of the lock, it gets used dozens of times a week, and the batteries outlast the spec sheet. If you can live with the cloud dependency, it’s an easy smart lock to recommend.

My rating: 4 out of 5

More Home Assistant gear I run: my Home Assistant Voice Preview Edition review and my Zigbee network audit.