Ep. #5: High Speed Doors - Trends and Applications

This episode of Right from the Source features John Schumacher, who's the Right Height Doors Director of Marketing. Today he discusses how to use the outdoor applications in clean room areas and other clean room environments. Listening to right from the source. Productivity, energy system. and environmental control. Thanks for joining us listeners. On today's podcast we have with us John Schumacher from Right Height. John, what's your title? Uh director of marketing for the door company.

So give me a little bit of background on yourself, John. I've been with Right High for twenty four years. Uh started out in sales, have done everything from sales management to uh territory salesperson to developing technology and the last Twelve years have been with the Door Company, helping to create new products, trying to find out what's new on the market and developing products to meet those needs. Now I know that you were also part of uh DASMA.

Still part of DASMA, yes. DASMA is the door access systems manufacturers association. So I work with them on trends in the industry and um making sure that our doors comply with changing codes that are out there. Can you give us a little background on high speed doors? There's a lot of different types, there's a lot of different moving parts. Uh well high speed doors in general have been around for

40 years. They've really evolved a lot the last twenty years. Part of that has been on the safety end. You know, high speed doors, because there is something moving really fast, there can be interactions with people or equipment that are going through the doors. So about twenty years ago we looked at different things like soft edge or or taking the dangerous metal parts out of the curtain. So if it does impact a person, uh they're not gonna get injured.

The other thing is traditionally high speed doors were really kind of maybe the exterior doors on a building. Now we're bringing them more into the facilities from an energy saving standpoint for clean rooms, wash down applications and food. So really the the different industries and applications out there require some different changes on the door. Different materials. You know, if you look at food, you might have things like stainless steel or non-corrosive materials.

where a a general industrial would be fine with steel or aluminum. Uh same thing with pharmaceutical where you're trying to keep particulates out of a room or keep good air pressure. They're gonna want something cleaner, like a stainless steel or some composite material, uh, versus the traditional steel. What does that door look like? It is made out of fabric. How does that work?

Yeah, most most high speed doors. There are some um high performance or high speed doors out there that are not made of fabric. But as I mentioned earlier, with doors getting impacted often or coming in contact with machinery, the doors that tend to not be fabric tend to get damaged.

So meaning if you hit'em you're spending five thousand dollars or better to repair a door. Where if you've got a fabric door it's a little bit more forgiving. So as you have that high speed traffic, um high activity traffic going through, there's less chance of damage with a fabric door. Now if it does get knocked off the track, I mean is there any way that it can come back on? Do you have to have somebody service it?

That's also one of the things that's changed over the last twenty or thirty years is when doors were impacted in the past. It was an expensive repair. And over time they evolved into something that would be less costly to repair or simpler to repair. Now we've actually evolved to the point where the door will automatically fix itself as it goes up. So Pretty hard to damage him.

Now you mentioned a a couple of different trends that are going on in s uh specific industries. Okay. Uh food and bev was one of them. Yep. Uh can you explain some of the differences on maybe somebody in in that industry who's looking for a high speed door? What are some things, some advantages maybe that uh one door might have over another? The food industry for sure, most important thing is food safety. They want to make sure that the products that they create don't get anybody sick.

So they're really looking for bacteria control. You know, they want to be able to clean every inch of the facility. So when we look at things like even the doors, you want to minimize. Surface to surface contact area. So anywhere you have two pieces coming together, it's really hard to get in and wash in between them, but bacteria can get in there. So what we want to do is

separate things, create more areas where you can get in and clean and sanitize. And so we've designed the doors that way. So any place where there was materials together in the past, we've put spacers in between. It's just a little bit different way of thinking to to fit a need for the customers.

Uh the other thing, as I mentioned earlier, was just the materials. There's a lot of caustic cleaners that are used in the food industry. We want to make sure that our doors can stand up to that that caustic environment. Uh so for example a right height door that you're going to a a food and bev plant with how many washdowns, how many cycles can it can it go through of that?

It's very typical at a USDA inspected facility to do a washdown every day. So three hundred a year and we expect these doors to last, you know, ten years. So you're gonna have three thousand washdown cycles on that. So yes, it is quite a bit. Uh also in food and bev, obviously a lot of situations where there's going to be food that needs to be refrigerated. How do high speed doors work in that situation?

Typically on a high speed door, we want to try to get a good balance between a panel that's thick enough to insulate, save energy, not get frost and ice building up on the panel. But also we don't want to go with the old school thick hard panels that are a high R value, but when you impact them, they get damaged. So again, we're trying to find that balance between functionality of the product and performance. in the environment where when it does get impacted it still continues to to operate.

Are you hearing things from customers too as you're designing these doors to try and find that happy medium, or how does that process work for you guys? Well typically we try to get out in front of customers as often as possible. So we're seeing things in the real world. We're seeing things that get damaged. We're asking a lot of questions of the customers. And then really it's working with engineering to come up with some concept.

And then we we take those concepts back to customers and say, Hey, what do you think of this? Try will you try this out for us? And we use customers for a lot of beta tests to prove out the products and arrive at something that we think is fantastic. Yeah.

Uh wanna flip gears here a little bit to a different industry, but also one that has a lot of stringent regulations. I'm talking about pharmaceuticals here. Right. So what kinds of doors do you have for for that? uh industry and are they the same? Are they different? How different uh if they are? The doors themselves, as far as the functionality of the door, is similar. But like the food industry, we're looking at different materials.

Looking at a lot of stainless steels. Aesthetics is huge in the food industry. They just want something that's going to look really clean, really good. So when inspectors are walking by, they want to just have them keep walking by, right? They don't want the inspectors to stop and look at things. So if something looks really nice and functions well, the inspectors don't stop and look. The other thing is they need quality control in their rooms.

So typically your rooms are gonna have smaller doors, right? Because every time you open your door you've got that exchange of Something from one side of the opening to the other. So they really have a typically a a door might be six by eight, which is a pretty small door. So as the door opens and closes, you have a minimal exchange of air between the rooms. You want a tight seal because most of those rooms are pressurized. So they need to maintain that pressure within the room.

Now I know in the the pharmaceutical industry a lot of times they're sort of like the the byparting type of door. So can you explain maybe the the roll up and and by parting? So yeah, we have I say the majority of the doors we sell are a roll up type door that are overhead. Um we also make a door called the split second, which opens in and is really by rolling. So it rolls to the side uh versus just up. Advantage of that is it's

Full height visibility as you're going through. So you don't have anything in obstructing your vision as you approach the door. Typically in a pedestrian environment, a lot of pedestrians feel safer with a door that bipark. They're used to that. You know, you walk into Walgreens or Walmart, you've got a byparting door. In an industrial setting, same thing. You got a byparting door. So it's more familiar for pedestrians than something rolling up over your head.

Are there any specific concerns that pharmaceutical customers have had that they're looking at either regulation wise or just basic needs that they might have in a door? One trend has has really been just minimizing the controls or things that are on the wall. So what we've started doing is a lot more flush mount controls. So nothing's sticking off the wall, nothing that has a ledge that dust might accumulate on or or particulates might accumulate on.

So looking at just the fit and finish, flush mount, the aesthetics of the overall opening. So uh something else I wanted to talk about was different emerging industries, maybe things that uh are just really gaining some legs. How do doors play a role in that? Is it is similar to a clean room environment?

It is. Uh if we if we look at, you know, you look at things like electric cars and all the batteries that are gonna be going into those in the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty years, battery factories are gonna be built all over the place to support those markets.

Part of the process of that is is like a clean room environment, like a high-tech clean room environment, but they're using a lot of dry rooms where they have a really low humidity level within these rooms. They're using the same types of high-speed doors. But a unique part of that process is there's certain materials that can't be used.

So, you know, no brass or or other things within the door. So we have to look at again the design, the materials that are used. The design of the product might look the same, it might function the same, but you just have to be particular about what Materials are used, light versus aluminum, steel, stainless steel, and then now taking out things like brass or other items within the door. And then still making sure that it functions properly.

And still making sure it goes up and down a million times. Yeah. Right? Well John, uh appreciate you taking the time here to chat with us today. Is there anything that we really missed on that you would want to talk about with high speed doors? Yeah. All right. Well hey, thanks again John for being on the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode of Write from the Source, be sure to subscribe on your preferred listening platform and follow Right Heights.

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