PSA: Please read if you own a Winchester Safe . . .

[ranchdude]

This is a long thread, but I figured since my searches for information regarding my problem landed me here, I'd add on to this with what I just learned...

I have a Winchester 10 gun safe from TSC with electronic keypad that I've owned for about a year. I have just recently replaced the battery for the first time, and that all went well, no issues at all.

Now, about a month after doing that I went to return a pistol to the safe this morning only to find that the keypad is unresponsive on the top half when it had just worked fine the night before to get my pistol out.

Well, I figured in my morning haze I had just hit a wrong button in the process of putting in my code. So after a few attempts I figured I'd just walk away from it for a while to see if it reset. Well, that didn't work. When I came back to it, it was doing exactly the same. Only the bottom two rows (7,8,9,*,0,#) of keys were responding and would "chirp" when pressed, and it was not taking a normal 6 digit entry before giving a yellow "no go" but was rather it was taking 8 digits before doing so. So of course, I couldn't enter my actual full code...

I figured I was screwed, especially after reading here what some people have go through.

I then tried disconnecting the battery and checked that the connector on the keypad was securely attached (it was), then reattached the battery. Nothing changed.

So, I disconnected the battery, then while it was disconnected I pressed several keys on the keypad just to make sure any residual charge left from the battery might be depleted. Then I reattached the battery.

All is now good, the keypad immediately came back to life. It appears the keypad or lock mechanism was in some strange programming mode and doing this procedure must have cleared it. Its not uncommon for something that runs off a battery to have a small capacitor in the circuitry to store a little reserve charge. And pressing some keys while the battery was disconnected seems to have drained that reserve charge and allowed it to reset. (at least that is my theory, and I'm sticking to it lol)

But I can at least access the safe for now. But I consider this a warning shot over the bow that it's time to replace this lock with something more dependable. Going through something like this isn't something I want to do in the middle of the night when I hear glass breaking. So I'll be going through all 10 pages here looking for the best suggestions.

Thanks to everyone who's contributed to this topic, it's much appreciated.

Hope this helps someone else out there.

RD out...