At long last there seems to be a paradigm shift in the attention paid to industrial door maintenance, so long an area of neglect, with costly consequences when doors break down. According to door specialist, Hormann UK, who have seen demand for service support rise sharply over the last two years, there are three main reasons for this trend. They include the complexity of newer equipment, changes to legislation and the sector’s commitment to improving operational safety. Health and Safety is now being taken very seriously and staff are trained in the right manner. Just as manufacturer-backed routine and preventative maintenance programmes for forklifts have become the norm so, too, the same model is now being applied to industrial doors, particularly on the loading bay where they are often integrated with truck safety systems both within the loading bay and for delivery trucks backed up to the docks.
There is a host of reasons why doors will malfunction or be damaged with significant costs in terms of disruption to production processes and/or delays to shipments. For best results to counter these baleful occurrences there should be a two-pronged approach: preventative maintenance and an improved safety culture that would, for example, prevent truck/door collisions rather than deal with them after the event, even if the doors are the knock-out type.
The loading bay sector has done much through product innovation to ease the impact of door damage and injuries. These include photo electric cells on doors to prevent collisions with staff to forklift-fitted sensors and alarms to prevent trucks going through wrong-sized doors. But welcome though these safety features are they can only go so far and so therefore a robust safety/training regime must be in place. There are certain times of the year when warehouse accidents involving doors will rise like, for example, the run up to Christmas. This is because quite often temporary staff, some of whom may have a poor grasp of English, are taken on and so will be less aware of the safety issues. It is important, therefore, that even temporary staff are adequately trained, especially if they are forklift drivers.
Over the years, various kinds of doors have been developed to cut operational costs and improve hygiene, especially important in food and pharmaceutical premises. A key justification for door upgrades can be a move from manually-operated sliding doors to fast-acting, fully automated PVC roller doors where the energy savings alone can deliver an ROI in under two years. In this respect all the loading door suppliers and members of ALEM, will conduct free energy audits on site or allow users to download energy-saving solutions based on their own particular circumstances over the internet. Such fast-acting doors can also be an effective barrier against vermin, including the avian kind. Employing falconers on some premises where there is an open door policy is hardly effective, given that an accipiter on catching a pigeon could take all day eating it and then rest on its laurels for having made just one kill. There could also be a backlash against this form of control from bird fanciers.
Doors are particularly cost effective when used in cold and chilled stores, and this is an area that is constantly evolving. Hormann’s new Thermo SPU67 door has been developed to meet demand for improved thermal insulation. It features a 67 mm deep profile that incorporates thermal brakes between sections to offer improved U values. It will be more competitively priced than the DPU door it will replace and the thermal insulation provided means up to 55% less energy is lost in commercial premises. This is worth considering given that energy costs in a cold store can account for around 25% of total operating costs.
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