Commercial door questions, answered

Charlotte, North Carolina. City proper. There are no service-area pages on this site because there is no service area beyond the city.

No.

No. Commercial openings only.

Neither is ours. Low-energy and full power operators need an operator specialist with the right tooling and the right liability position. Overhead sectional, rolling steel and high-speed doors are a different trade entirely. Revolving and balanced doors are also out.

No. We will work the hardware and the frame on a glazed opening, but glazing replacement goes to a glazier.

A magnet. Hollow metal is steel and holds it; aluminum does not. Hollow metal also usually shows a seam running up the vertical edge of the leaf, and an aluminum entrance has a visible extruded stile framing a glass or panel infill.

Fibreglass reinforced polyester. Fibreglass faces over an insulated core, normally with a pultruded stile frame. If you have one it is almost certainly in a kitchen, a wash-down area or somewhere corrosive, because that is the only reason anybody specifies them. They are non-magnetic and feel warmer to the touch than aluminum.

On the hinge edge of the leaf, and there should be a separate one on the frame rabbet. Photograph both. If the leaf has been painted over enough times the label can be buried, which is itself a finding.

It means nobody can demonstrate that it is, which in a rated opening is functionally the same problem. An unlabelled leaf in a rated wall is a common inspection finding and it is not something you can fix by assuming.

NFPA 80 sets 1/8 in maximum at the head, at both jambs and at the meeting edges of a pair, with steel doors carrying a plus or minus 1/16 in tolerance. Maximum undercut is 3/4 in, dropping to 3/8 in where the bottom of the door sits more than 38 in above the finished floor.

Within the undercut limits and within what the manufacturer permits, sometimes. Beyond that, no — the rating is carried by the construction of the leaf and a field cut past the permitted amount voids it. On a wood rated leaf in particular, check with the manufacturer before anyone takes a saw to it.

No, and this is the single most common thing we find. A rated door held open by anything that is not a listed hold-open device released by the fire alarm is a defeated fire door. If staff are propping it, the door is unusable for some reason and the reason is fixable.

For an interior hinged door on an accessible route the 2010 ADA Standards set 5 lbf maximum in Section 404.2.9, and that figure excludes the force needed to retract latch bolts. The exterior hinged case is reserved — the ADA states no federal number for it — and fire doors are exempted from the 5 lbf limit and deferred to the authority having jurisdiction. For egress doors generally, IBC Section 1010.1.3 sets 15 lbf to release the latch, 30 lbf to set the door in motion and 15 lbf to swing it full open.

From 90 degrees open, at least 5 seconds to reach 12 degrees from the latch, under ADA Section 404.2.8.1. Doors on spring hinges are timed differently: from 70 degrees, at least 1.5 seconds to closed, under 404.2.8.2. The two get confused constantly and the spring hinge case gets written up for it.

Under ANSI/BHMA A156.4, a Grade 1 closer has been cycle tested to 2,000,000 cycles. It does not mean the same thing on other hardware. A Grade 1 exit device under A156.3 is tested to 500,000 cycles, with preload applied since the 2014 edition. Comparing grade numbers across standards is meaningless.

We are not going to give you one number, and you should be suspicious of anybody who does without naming the standard and the series. Bored locks are covered by ANSI/BHMA A156.2 and mortise locks by A156.13, both with a Grade 1 / 2 / 3 structure. The published cycle figures vary by series and by edition and sources disagree, so we cite the standard and the grade and leave the count to the current published edition.

Because we would be making them up. What we publish instead is the list of variables that decide the figure on each service page — whether the frame is in scope, whether the leaf is rated, what the wall is made of, whether the closer is surface or floor-mounted. Those are the things that actually move it.

A commercial door job is three or four questions and a form is a worse way to ask them. Call and it is settled in one conversation instead of two days of email.

Sometimes, partly. A photo of the rating label, a photo of the strike and a tape measure reading at the head and undercut will get us a long way. A photo of a door that looks fine will not.

Nothing we are going to publish as a star rating on our own site. There are no invented review counts here and no rating schema in the markup, and the absence is deliberate rather than an oversight.