Commercial doors
Rolling steel, sectional dock doors and jackshaft operators — where the cycle count is a budget line and the safety devices are edges and curtains, not one beam.
A house door does about 1,500 cycles a year. A busy dock door can do that in five weeks. Everything about how you buy parts and schedule work changes at that rate, and pretending otherwise is how a building ends up with a door down on a Monday morning.
Rolling steel service doors and their counterbalance barrels. Sectional dock doors. Jackshaft and trolley operators, three-button stations, and the reversing edges and light curtains that go with them.
Cycles are the budget
On a house, a spring's cycle rating is a rough guide to how many years you get. On a commercial door it is a line item you can actually forecast.
Count the door's real traffic for a week — most operations know it or can guess within twenty per cent. Forty cycles a day is roughly 14,000 a year. Against a 10,000-cycle spring that is a failure inside a year; against a 100,000-cycle spring it is seven. High-cycle springs on commercial doors are not an upsell, they are the difference between planned maintenance and an unplanned shutdown with a truck waiting outside.
We will put the number on the quote: the rating fitted, your estimated daily cycles, and the expected replacement date that falls out of the two. Then it is a maintenance schedule instead of a surprise.
Rolling steel is a different animal
A rolling steel door is not a sectional door with different panels. The curtain is interlocking slats that roll onto a barrel above the opening, and the counterbalance spring lives inside that barrel. Tension is adjusted at the barrel end, and the whole assembly is heavier and less forgiving than residential torsion gear.
Common faults are different too: slats that have been bent by a forklift and need individual replacement, guides packed with debris, bottom bars that have been struck and no longer sit square, and a curtain that has been forced when the tension is wrong.
Safety on a commercial door
The residential reverse test is not the whole story here, because commercial doors have different control types and different rules attached to them.
Constant pressure
Many commercial installations run on a three-button station where closing is constant-pressure: the door only moves while somebody is holding the button and can see the opening. That is a deliberate safety design, and defeating it by taping a button down is an old trick that turns the door into a hazard.
Reversing edges and light curtains
A pneumatic or electric edge along the bottom bar reverses the door on contact. A light curtain covers the whole opening rather than a single beam. Both are tested on every visit, and both fail quietly — an edge with a cracked hose still looks perfectly fine.
The same refusal applies
We will not increase the closing force, disable an edge, bypass a curtain or bridge a photo-eye so that a door keeps working through a fault. On a dock with people and equipment moving under the opening, that is a considerably worse idea than it is on a driveway. If a door cannot be made to pass its safety tests, it goes out of service until it can, and that goes on the paperwork.
Scheduled rather than reactive
For anything above a handful of cycles a day, the sensible arrangement is a scheduled visit — quarterly or twice a year depending on traffic — where every door is checked, the wear parts are logged, and replacements are ordered before they are urgent. It is cheaper than emergencies and much cheaper than a door that cannot close at the end of a shift.
Two trucks means we are honest about capacity. We take on the number of buildings we can genuinely cover, and when we are at that number we say so.
A door that runs forty times a day is a different machine
A household door does about 1,500 cycles a year. A dock door can do that in five weeks. So commercial springs are specified against your actual count and the expected replacement date goes on the quote, which turns a spring failure from an emergency into a line in next year’s budget.
The safety devices are different too — a reversing edge or a light curtain rather than a pair of eyes — and they get tested at every visit whether or not they are what we came for.
What it costs
- Attend and diagnose
- $129.00 for commercial, including a full safety device test and a written condition note per door.
- High-cycle springs
- Quoted against your actual daily cycle count, with the expected replacement date stated on the quote.
- Rolling steel slat replacement
- Quoted per slat and per curtain. Forklift damage is usually a handful of slats rather than a curtain.
- Reversing edge or light curtain
- Quoted per opening. Tested at every visit whether or not it is what we came for.
- Scheduled maintenance
- Priced per door per visit, with the wear parts logged so next year's budget is a number rather than a hope.
Example figures on a demonstration site. They are the shape of real pricing — a call-out plus parts — not a quote from anybody.