A bollard is one of the few security measures that physically changes your property. Cameras can be moved and alarms can be swapped, but a sleeve drilled into your driveway is there for good. That's a reason to slow down for ten minutes before saying yes to anyone, us included.
These are the five questions we'd want answered if it were our driveway.
1. Where exactly will it go, and why there?
This is the question that decides whether a bollard does anything at all. A bollard that sits to one side of the driveway, where a car can be steered around it, is decoration. It needs to sit in the path the car has to take to leave.
A good installer should be able to explain the position in plain terms: why that spot blocks the exit, how it works with the car parked where you actually park it, and whether you'll still be able to open car doors, wheel the bins out and get the mower past. On tandem or double driveways, the answer may be two bollards, or one placed nearer the car than the street.
Also ask whether the spot is on your land. Driveways often run across the nature strip and footpath to the kerb, and that part usually belongs to the council. A bollard there needs council involvement. Inside your boundary, it's your call.
2. What's under the concrete, and how deep does it go?
Pipes and cables often run under driveways: water, gas, stormwater, power, data. A hole drilled into one of them is an expensive day. Ask how the installer checks for services before drilling. Before You Dig Australia exists for exactly this reason, and it's a fair question whether they use it.
Then ask about depth and fixing. Our core-drilled sleeves go 400 to 500 millimetres into the ground and are anchored so the bollard can't be levered out. Some surfaces, such as thin pavers or crumbling old slabs, need breaking out and reinstating rather than a straight core. The point isn't that our numbers are the only right ones. It's that any installer should be able to tell you theirs, in writing.
3. Whose keys open it?
A lock is only as private as its key. Some products ship with keys that are shared across many units. That means anyone who has bought the same bollard may have a key that fits yours.
Ask whether the lock is unique to you, whether there's a master key anywhere, and what happens if you lose your keys. With ours, every lock is unique by default and there's no master. If you have more than one bollard, we can key them alike so one key opens all of them.
4. Who is actually doing the work, and is the price fixed?
Some bollards are sold by one company and installed by whoever that company can find that week. That isn't automatically bad, but you should know before the day who will turn up, and who answers the phone if something isn't right afterwards.
Ask too whether the price is a fixed quote or an estimate. Concrete hides things, and an estimate can grow once the drill finds steel reinforcement, an old slab under a newer one, or a surface that needs breaking out. A fixed quote puts that risk on the installer, which is where it belongs, because they're the one who should have assessed it.
5. What does it look like when the bollard is out?
A removable bollard spends some of its life out of the ground, when you want the driveway clear. What's left behind matters. A good install leaves a neat round sleeve with a flush cap you can drive over and that sits level with the slab. A poor one leaves a raised lip, a cracked edge or a cap that rattles loose.
Ask to see photos of finished installs with the bollard out. And ask what happens if you sell. A sleeve and bollard are usually treated as a fixture that stays with the property, though you can choose to take the bollard and cap the sleeve.
The honest bit
A driveway bollard won't make a home secure on its own. It doesn't stop someone getting into the house, and it only works if it's locked in every night. What it does well is a narrow, important job: it stops a car being driven off the property, even when someone has the keys.
If an installer can answer these five questions clearly, you're probably in good hands. If they can't, or the answers change between the quote and the day, that tells you what you need to know.