Industrial doors are like forklifts in one sense: they should not be bought primarily on initial price but rather on the life cycle costs. The best way to find out the answers to a particular door product’s life cycle costs is to speak to the door users, and all leading door manufacturers like Hormann, Union Industries, Sara and Stertil will gladly refer buyers to their customers for site visits. The initial door cost over its life span will be far exceeded by maintenance and after-sales services, particularly where busy door users cannot afford for their doors to be out of action too long. According to Union Industries, many door users are always concerned about the purchase price but, as many have experienced, “buying cheap doors from the budget end of the market can, in fact, turn out to be a false economy as the on-going costs for constant call-outs, repairs and parts can be astronomical,” says Union. This is particularly so if the door supplier does not have a detailed specification on how much use a door will get and so provides a cheap quote to win the business.
In respect of call-outs, many are due to accidental forklift collisions with fast-acting roller doors and so door users should consider counter measures like Union’s Crash-out & Auto-Reset Damage Protection if their door damage history is alarming. One car manufacturer used to spend £50,000 a year repairing door damage caused by forklift hits. Most leading door makers now provide such knock-out features, including those for cold stores. Some care, however, is needed over choice of crash-friendly doors because some are better than others.
A clue to the best choice of door supplier is to ask if it offers a lifetime warranty which covers all major door components for failure and which also includes door servicing by the supplier. At the very least door buyers should think of dealing only with members of ALEM (Association of Loading Bay and Elevating Equipment Manufacturers), as many of these members supply doors as part of a loading bay package. Dealing with repeated accidental door damage, however, is a reactive measure and does nothing to diminish future damage so loading bay operators, in particular, should consider a combination of enhanced driver training and safety devices.
If a door supplier does not provide its own, dedicated maintenance service (most do) it is important to choose a maintenance provider with care and that usually means sticking with the door provider’s list of approved service engineers who use only approved replacement parts. It is not unusual for non- recommended maintenance engineers to fail to fix the doors and then blame the door maker’s equipment.
Doors are coming under greater scrutiny owing to the need to meet Government legislation like the Energy Act, 2011, which will apply to warehouses in 2018. Maintaining temperatures, whether cool or warm, is important for obtaining energy performanace certificates and a key problem can occur when lorries back up to dock levellers to form a temporary door. To solve this, loading bay equipment providers have offered inflatable dock seals for decades but in the past they have not been particularly good at maintaining a tight temperature range. Such a range is critical for chilled food warehouses meeting a steady 4 deg C, especially if daytime temperatures reach 45 dg C, as Maltese food distributor, Mizzi, found. To keep the initial temperature right, Mizzi had to make the chiller work extra hard, pushing up the energy bills. Initial trials with dock shelters proved unsuitable because hot air could enter through the gaps. The solution was to buy Thorworld’s inflatable dock seals because they offered the closest seal between trailer and loading bay for most loading bay shapes and sizes. Where the standard inflatable seal was not the right size Thorworld provided a bespoke size when Mizzi decided to buy smaller trailers to handle diversification in its product range.
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