Commercial doors and hardware
From an office door that sticks to a rated assembly that has to be documented — every door in your building, and everything attached to it. Here is what we work on and what tends to go wrong with each.
The doors in your building
Most commercial buildings contain several of these. Some are fire-rated and some are not, and in our experience nobody has catalogued which is which.
Wood & interior doors
Office, meeting room, washroom, sliding and pocket doors. The everyday openings that make up most of the doors in a building.
Wood & interior →Sliding, pocket & barn doors
Bypass, pocket, barn-style, telescoping and folding partitions. Tracks, rollers and guides rather than hinges.
Sliding & pocket →Hollow metal doors & frames
The workhorse of commercial buildings. Steel leaf, steel frame, available fire-rated. Stairwells, service areas, mechanical rooms, exterior doors.
Hollow metal →Rolling steel doors & fire shutters
Industrial openings, loading areas, counter shutters and rated fire shutters that drop on alarm. Common and frequently uninspected.
Rolling steel →Storefront & glass entrances
Aluminium framed entrances, vestibules and glazed interior doors. The first thing a visitor touches and the hardest working door in the building.
Storefront →The parts that actually fail
Doors rarely fail. Hardware does. These two account for the large majority of the calls we attend.
Door closers
The single most common fault in any commercial building. A closer that no longer pulls the door fully shut and latched is a fire code deficiency, not an inconvenience.
Door closers →Exit devices & panic hardware
Safety-critical hardware on egress routes, subject to constant abuse. A jammed panic bar is both a code violation and a genuine hazard.
Exit devices →We also work on hinges and pivots, locksets and cylinders, strikes and coordinators, flush bolts, overhead stops, hold-opens, gasketing and smoke seals, thresholds and sweeps, kick plates, and electrified hardware including electric strikes, magnetic locks and door position switches.
A fire door is an assembly, not a door
Most doors in a building are not fire-rated, and we repair those exactly as you would expect. But any of the types above can be rated — including wood ones — and when a door is, it was tested and certified as a complete unit: leaf, frame, hinges, closer, latch, seals and glazing together.
Change any part of that assembly and the certification no longer holds. A closer substituted during a repair with something not listed for that door invalidates the rating, even though the door works perfectly. So does a hole drilled for hardware later removed, or gasketing pulled out during a refit and never replaced.
This is why we ask what a door is before we quote how to fix it, and why we will tell you when a repair that seems straightforward would leave you non-compliant.
Not sure what you have?
Send a photograph. We can usually identify the door type, the hardware and whether it is rated from a picture, before anyone attends.