Preventing Mailbox Breaks STD-4B vs 4C

Our community has an open mail house at the entrance of our neighborhood. Our community was built in 2002 and we have STD-4B mailboxes.

This year, we have had over 15 breakin attempts, mostly successful. They just need a crowbar to wedge the door open and they can steal everyone's mail.

Would it be more effective to:

1) Pay roughly $22,000 for new STD-4C mailboxes, OR
2) Pay roughly $7,000 to build an iron fence around the mail house with a mechanical number keypad lock

I'm leaning towards option 1 because our mailboxes are getting old and worn and probably do need to get replaced at some point anyway, and an iron fence around the mail house would look unsightly. However, I worry we will still get breakins with the STD-4C mailboxes and will end up needing the gate anyway.

May I suggest discussing this with the Postal service? They have an entire "police" system. Stealing mail is at the Federal level. So it's time to not call local enforcement only. You have to contact the Postal system. They also sell the mailboxes you may want as well. Go consult the experts. Which in this case is Post office.

Thanks for all the responses!

I am located in Austin, TX. We already have several HD cameras and we've gotten pretty good footage of the thieves, but it's not stopping them from trying.

We own the mailboxes. I have tried to contact USPS but it's been incredibly difficult to get to anyone who has any sort of knowledge or that cares enough to help. Even when we have footage of a suspect stealing mail several times and were able to identify who she is, the postal investigator refused to press charges when the detective reached out to them. I will continue to try but figured I'd see if anyone here had any experience.

I think we'd like to do the number lock because of cost. Perhaps we could change out the code annually?

Having just purchased a New Key Fob system for our property it is a really reasonable option IMO.

Happy,
Couple of questions

1) How many units in your HOA?
2) Do you use Key Fobs for any thing else on property? It is very cheap to add a reader to an existing system.
3) Changing codes every year is not really a good ides for the reasons we have already mentioned.
Could you just put a lock on the gate and every HO gets a key to the gate and it is attached to the ring that has mailbox key on it.

I am just 1 City north of you and have a great contractor we used to install our Key Fob system. I do the adds and additions as the President of our board. It is very easy to maintain.

Hi Mark!

Here are my answers:
1) How many units in your HOA? 204 single family homes
2) Do you use Key Fobs for any thing else on property? It is very cheap to add a reader to an existing system. We do not. We do have a gate and the keypad can read HID fobs, so we could issue a fob that works for both mail room and gate if it was HID enabled.
3) Changing codes every year is not really a good ides for the reasons we have already mentioned.
Could you just put a lock on the gate and every HO gets a key to the gate and it is attached to the ring that has mailbox key on it. I would worry it's easy to copy and distribute the mail key or that the lock would be in constant need of maintenace due to the number of times it is used.

I'll definitely take the suggestion of using a key fob somehow, but since we recently had a financial disaster at the hands of our last property management, we really don't have any funds saved up to address this so we are trying to keep costs as low as possible.

I'd definitely love to know which contractor you used as well as which system you used, and how much that set you back.

Thanks!

If a roof in a reserve study calls for replacement every 20-30 years, shouldn't a mail box that gets a lot of use and abuse?

Our doors are sagging because of being opened and closed everyday. I've had to screw in several random loose screws, but even then, the doors are very rickety and require you to hold them up, them slam hard to actually latch properly. USPS here is not kind to our doors. It doesn't help that we've also had them broken into several times this past year.

Happy,
If you stay on your board long enough and do everything to help out you may end up changing your name on this site to GrumpyE.

We have a contract post office and it's worked well for us. Highly secure, locked between 10pm and 7am, cameras interior and exterior. We can receive USPS, FedEx, UPS, OnTrac packages at the post office. I prefer home delivery on packages. Has anyone mentioned USPS Informed Delivery? No charge, mail and packages are scanned at a distribution center, emails sent six days per week on incoming mail, packages.

I researched a few vendors of CBU replacements. I couldn't find any materials that even suggest what the Useful Life of a CBU is. Ours are not rickety, there are no loose hinges, no squeaky boxes, nothing obvious at all that cries for maintenance, never mind replacement. They're all STD-4B which, I believe, is the standard we can still use. Major rennovation projects would require STD-4C. We've got no busted-through keyholes or bent doors (and amazingly enough) all keys are accounted for.

I'm not against putting a compnent in the reserves for the mailboxes. When would they need to be replaced (Useful Life)? The current ones are currently 31 years old and by extrapolating the "wear and tear" they've been subject to so far, My initial value for "Remaining Useful Life" at this point would be (another) 30 years.

Could this be a case of "they don't make them like they used to" and brand new replacement mailboxes wouldn't be expected to last more than 20 years? Some other value? What I don't want to do is pick an arbitrary number.