Ep. #23: How to Select the Right High Speed Door for Your Company

This episode of Right from the Source features John Schumacher, the Right-High Doors Director of Marketing. He shares with listeners the best ways to find the right door. From the food industry and the first time. Heві manufacturing You're listening to right from the source. Expert insights on safety, security, and you can see. Energy savings and environment. And in the

Welcome listeners. We've got another Right from the Source podcast for you. And our guest today is John Schumacher. Yeah, I'm John Schumacher, Director of Marketing and New Product Development for Right Height Doors. I've been in the industry for 26 years. Um the last fifteen of which in my current position. High speed, high performance doors in the world. Um, hobbies and passions. I love to travel, especially international travel. Been a little tough this last year.

But also spending time on the great Wisconsin Lakes with my kids, my wife and family. Well, with uh 26 years of experience, I would say that you would be a go-to resource for talking about high-speed doors. So let's start with a the brief overview of high-speed doors.

What makes a door a high speed door and what are some of the basic types? Well, if we look at uh our industry trade group DASMA, which is the door access systems manufacturers association, they have a formal definition. which is uh high performance doors are non residential powered doors. Characterized by rolling, folding, sliding, or a swinging action that are either high cycle, meaning they uh go up and down over a hundred times a day.

or high speed, a minimum of twenty inches a second, and two out of three of the following, which is either made to order for exact sizes, built with breakaway capability, or designed to sustain heavy usage with minimal maintenance. And now while that's the formal definition, that's a fairly low bar. Most high-speed high performance doors exceed those numbers by quite a bit. Most high-speed doors are going to be in the range of 30 to 50 inches per second, depending on their size.

And we actually have doors that go up to a hundred or a hundred and twenty inches per second on the open. All of the high performance doors generally close slower from a safety standpoint. So even if you have a door that opens at a hundred inches per second. It'll generally close somewhere between twenty and thirty inches a second. So can you talk a little bit about some of the the different ways that uh high speed doors work? You've got

a traditional pedestrian door that just is typically a a swing open, but with high speed doors, we're talking about different kinds of operation, yes? Yeah, correct. And and like we said in the DASMA definition, you know, it could be folding, sliding, swinging, any of those. But I think when you look at high performance doors out in the market that people are using, I'd say ninety percent or better are a roll-up type door or a door that we we would call upward acting.

Sometimes they roll up, uh, sometimes they're in a track like your garage door, you know, that or go straight up the wall. The next most common style would be a a sliding door. The benefits to sliding doors are really dependent on your door size and what's your application. For instance, if you have a freezer opening that's

eight feet wide and twelve feet tall, uh, it's much more efficient to open and close an eight foot opening than it is a twelve foot opening, right? It's quicker. You have your door closed more often. So In most cases like that, you would want a sliding door or a biparting sliding door. Limitations would be generally side-acting doors or sliding doors require some wall space.

So let's say you've got um pillars or something near your door opening and you can't put a sliding door in, then your next option would go to that upward acting door.

As far as materials go for these doors, are they typically made of the the same materials or does it even depend on the operation or the industry? Really depends on the application and the industry. Uh most high performance doors have a basically a frame, a side frame or a header that's either steel or aluminum, uh sometimes galvanized.

certain industries like pharmaceutical or food where you have caustic washdown cleaning, uh you'll generally go with stainless steels. So as far as the metal, the stiff structures of the doors. They vary based on industries and application type. As far as the curtains themselves, the roll-up doors are generally a a pretty thick, durable fabric that can take impacts and and last for millions of cycles. Uh and those will either be made of vinyl or polypropylene or or a urethane.

And then when you get into freezer applications, you might have some of those vinyls and urethanes or or polypropylenes for an outer skin, but then you're gonna have some kind of insulation within it. So really the doors vary as much by application. Some of the parts might be consistent, but um they're just put together different ways.

Okay. Let's get into the types of businesses that use high speed doors. Is there one kind of uh industry vertical that tends to to use a high speed door than another, or is it something that's really permeating a a lot of different industries? Good question. Uh actually there are some industries that use most high speed doors. So if we take three industries, if we just look at pharmaceutical, food manufacturing and food distribution.

They use about 50% of all the high-speed doors. Wow. So everybody else makes up the rest. And the reason for that is that in a facility they generally have more doors in one place, either because they're using clean rooms or airlock. uh separating processes, you know, cooked food from raw food from from the warehouse. If you look at a warehouse uh that's let's say moving furniture around, they may have two or three high-speed doors in the entire warehouse.

Once you start getting into something where it's temperature controlled, maybe it's a a vegetable warehouse, they might have ten or fifteen doors in there. Once you get into cold storage, you might have twenty or thirty doors in a facility.

You might have a pharmaceutical facility that in a ten thousand square foot building might have thirty high-speed doors just because they have small rooms that they're trying to separate environments. So while I think every industry uses high performance doors. Food manufacturing, food distribution, and pharmaceutical takes about half of them.

So you mentioned one of those applications too as far as the separation of temperatures in various rooms. Obviously that's a that's a huge uh factor that goes into determining what door is right. What other kinds of things do uh facility managers really need to take into account when choosing the right high speed door?

One is efficiency, productivity. If you're trying to get certain traffic patterns from a safety standpoint, maybe you only want traffic going in one direction. You can just activate it from that one direction. Energy savings. Also employee comfort. You know, if if you've got a typical warehouse might have an external door that's a large door, maybe 16 by 16 feet.

And maybe they only go out to the yard five times a day, right? But when they go out to the yard, someone gets off their fork truck, pushes a button on the sixteen by sixteen garage door, and says, I'm just gonna be out here for five minutes. So they go outside for five minutes and maybe they're out for ten minutes. But they don't bother to close that door behind them. Now you've got 10 minutes of here in Wisconsin, really cold air coming in that affects uh employee comfort.

Where if you had a high speed automated door, as soon as that person goes out, the door closes again. They're out there for five, ten minutes, whatever it is, when they come back, the door opens and closes again. So it's energy, it's employee comfort. High performance doors are for any environment you're trying to separate. We see'em sometimes in places where uh you have a noisy environment. Maybe it's a auto manufacturing and you have stamping going on in one area.

some other areas more general assembly, you might want to separate that area with a high performance door just to keep the noise down in certain areas.

What are some other factors that really might go into into that selection and that specification? The thing I try to get across to most customers is If you're putting in a high performance door, you're trying to separate some environment. Ideally you want to make that door opening as small as possible.

Right. So when that door opens, you've got less air movement or whatever going through that door. So try to look at the equipment that's going through. You know, sometimes it's a case where once every three years you got a big piece of machinery you have to move in and you need a door a certain height. But generally you want to keep a door as small as possible to get your equipment through. That gives you the best separation of environment.

The application, really it's good to have a conversation about what you're trying to accomplish because uh high performance doors range for different applications, not only from materials and price, but what are you trying to do? If you have a caustic washdown, we're gonna want to make sure we have stainless steel and non-corrosive materials.

that might cost more and you certainly don't want to put that type of door in an environment where you don't need it because you're wasting money. If it's a pharmaceutical type application, you're gonna want a door that again has that Stainless steel has smooth edges. no flat surfaces for dust to collect on. But also you want a very tight seal so you minimize air leakage through the opening because you're generally dealing with a pressurized room on either side of that door.

You mentioned uh with with food, it sounds like food and pharma obviously are gonna have some of the more stringent regulations that are out there. Are there any specific differences between those two industries where maybe pharma's looking for certain things that that food even isn't?

Yeah, for sure. I mean pharma generally is really looking for aesthetics. They want an inspector to walk through the facility and have nothing stand out, right? They just want to say, Okay, that looks good, that looks good, that looks good. So they generally go for a lot more Stainless steel, very clean look.

And when they're cleaning, uh most environments in pharmaceutical are more of a wipe down. They'll have a sanitizing agent, but it's more of a cloth wipe down than it is a a wash down. In food, you have more of a heavy, high pressure soap sanitizer wash down of the product. So differences there would be on a pharma application you don't need watertight electricals, you don't need a waterproof motor.

Uh whereas a food application you're gonna need a door that can handle that water tightness, uh the electricals that can all handle the the water tightness. So generally it's an IP66 or an IP65. You know, even the selection of fabric. Can be different for different industries. When you have a a vinyl that's a PVC that is made softer using plasticizers, well, in in working with our fabric suppliers,

Uh we found out that vinyls, those plasticizers are something that microbes like to eat on. So from a food standpoint, we probably don't want to put vinyl doors in food applications because that's going to attract more microbes. So in those applications we use a polypropylene material which is more resistant to those. In fact the polypropylene that we use Is the same thing used for Huge water reservoirs, drinking water for reservoirs. So we choose those products.

That not only meet regulations but exceed what's required. So the same things that uh we're we're getting some of our drinking water from, you're making doors from Absolutely.

What other considerations should facility managers take into account when selecting a high speed door? I mean, is does customization come into it? Uh additional safety options perhaps? Well, certainly customization. All the doors we make are make to order. So, you know, we wanna come out, we wanna make sure that The door's gonna fit, whatever requirements around the door are gonna fit.

We want to make sure it's the right product for the application. Like I said, we don't want to sell you a door that's more than what you need. From a safety standpoint, A lot of the big things now are are additional safety around the doors and the communication and data that you're getting near the door. So while we've always put out a safe product that's gonna make sure no one gets hurt if they are underneath the door when it closes.

What we're finding is more and more customers that want safety beyond just that door opening. So a lot of the accidents that happen around doors are not so much that a door hits someone, it's that a person or some machinery runs into the door.

So somebody might be standing one foot away or two feet away from the door and the photo beam is not tracking them. So the door will start coming down. If they've got their back to the door and they turn around, they can run into the door and that could be a potential accident. So now we're putting on sensors.

that brings safety beyond the opening, maybe two or three or four feet away from the opening. So if anyone's in that area the door won't close. Also communication around the door opening. Just like you've got um your countdown timer at your crosswalk to tell you when when it's safe to cross the street. We now put LED countdown timers on our doors to let you know when that door is going to close.

Some new features that we're rolling out here this year are uh things like uh false activation detection. So if a door opens and nobody goes through that opening and the door closes again, that's wasted energy, wasted effort, more wear and tear on your door. So we track that information and over time we could tell you how many of your cycles are actually false activations and then work with you to come up with better solutions or

Change the positioning of the sensor to really just pick up what you want. We're looking at impact detection. So if a door gets hit, we log that information with a date and timestamp. And at the door you can look at how often has my door been hit, when was it hit. Gives you the opportunity to go back, look at security footage or cameras to see how did this happen so you can do better training at your facility or Again, maybe we need a better activation so that people aren't impacting the door.

John, is there anything as far as the high speed doors that you wanted to cover that we haven't so far? One of the things um that I'm pretty proud of that we've done at right height on our high performance doors is With just about every door we have, we try to use soft breakaway technology. Meaning most doors on the market have some

stiffness at the bottom of the door. Could be steel or aluminum or even a hard plastic edge at the bottom of the door to give it rigidity. So it's not just a curtain flapping in the wind. Well we've come up with designs where we get that rigidity by holding the curtain tight on the side versus having that rigid bottom edge.

And as I mentioned earlier, most impacts aren't a door hitting a person or equipment. It's the equipment or person hitting that door. Well, if that's the case, they're hitting that rigid bottom edge. What we want is to always have the safest doors on the market. Where if something impacts that door, it softly breaks away, not putting a bunch of force back onto that that person or that equipment or that product that's going through it. And with those right height doors.

And that breakaway capability can s just snap right back on. Absolutely. I'll true auto refeed. Yeah. Gotta love it. Awesome. Well I think that's a a perfect place to end our podcast here today, John. Listeners, be sure to follow Right Height on all social media platforms. Visit right com for additional information or to connect with a team member. John, thanks again. Thank you.

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