3-Star cylinders v 3-Star solutions
By Justin Harris, managing director, Winkhaus UK.
In recent years, the UK door industry has seen a rapid rise in the promotion and installation of 3-star cylinders as a simple, standalone security solution.
These products were introduced to offer ‘complete security in one package’, aiming to resist drilling, picking, bumping, and snapping without the need for additional protection such as cylinder shields, security escutcheons and security handles.
However, we believe the industry now faces a serious moral dilemma – one that cannot be ignored as we look to the future of secure door design.
The inconvenient truth
At Winkhaus, we have carried out extensive real-world testing at our UKAS-accredited laboratory for many years. This testing, combined with feedback from the field, has highlighted a troubling trend:
Thousands if not millions of 3-Star cylinders installed in homes over the last decade are now highly vulnerable to modern burglary techniques.
These cylinders were once cutting-edge, but as attack methods evolve – driven by rogue online tutorials, cheaply available tools, and the constant race between product development and criminal ingenuity – they no longer consistently offer the level of security their certification once promised.
This is not just a technical issue – it’s a moral one.
What we’ve witnessed is a reactive product cycle, where each new generation of 3-Star cylinders attempts to address the latest identified attack method. This means the door industry is continually retrofitting security after the threat has already materialized, leaving homeowners exposed in the meantime.
This short-term approach shifts risk onto the homeowner, rather than offering genuine, assured long-term protection.
For this reason, Winkhaus has always taken a different path. We firmly believe that a high-quality 1-Star cylinder, paired with correctly-specified 2-Star secondary protection, offers a more future-proof, reliable and responsible solution. This system approach creates a physical barrier that evolves far slower than the tools and techniques used to attack exposed cylinders.
This philosophy has been validated across every version of PAS 24 testing — our 1-Star XR6 cylinder range, when used with approved 2-Star armor, does not fail the PAS24 test.
This moral responsibility to offer genuine, long-term security becomes even more critical when we look ahead to the next three years, as Approved Document Q (ADQ) is expected to become mandatory across all door constructions, including not only new-builds but also retail and trade replacement doors.
This change places a legal and ethical duty on manufacturers to ensure the doors they supply into every home, regardless of sector meet a security standard fit for the future.
There is a clear choice:
- Repeat the same 3-Star cycle, knowing that vulnerabilities will likely emerge, requiring new iterations every few years.
- Take a more assured pragmatic approach, offering lasting security through a combination of high-quality 1-Star cylinders and external secondary 2-Star armor protection.
As an industry, we need to ask ourselves a hard question: Are we comfortable knowingly installing products today that we already suspect will be vulnerable within a few years?
At Winkhaus, we believe the answer must be no. That’s why we have chosen to resist the quick-fix route of 3-star cylinders, despite the ease with which we could have launched such a product. Instead, we have invested heavily in developing the highest quality 1-star cylinder, produced to German precision standards, with over 1.5 million cylinders produced annually at our German facility, 600,000 of which are the Xpert system from which our XR-651 1 star cylinder is derived.
A product designed to work in harmony with secondary 2 star armor protection to form a complete security system.
This is not just a technical preference. It is a moral stance, one that reflects our responsibility to our customers and the homeowners who trust the doors they buy to protect their families.
As the industry moves forward, and as regulation tightens, we would urge all responsible manufacturers to step back and ask: Are we designing for short-term convenience, or for long-term confidence?
At Winkhaus, our position is clear.
