Three different pieces of hardware can do the same job on a commercial door: hold it closed, bring it back under control, and let it latch. Which one is sitting on your door was usually decided by whoever built the opening, not by anyone who has had to maintain it since. That decision shows up […]

A smart lock is a motor, a battery and a small radio bolted onto hardware that was already in the door. The app is the easy part. What decides whether it still works next February is the door it went onto, and on a lot of Toronto houses that door has been quietly out of […]

When an access-controlled door stops working, the first call usually goes to whoever installed the card readers. Often that is the wrong trade. Electric strikes and magnetic locks sit at the junction of two systems, and the thing that has failed is more often the door than the electronics attached to it. Two Devices That […]

Walk into most Toronto retail entrances and you pass through two sets of doors with a small lobby between them. That lobby is a vestibule, and it exists to stop the street from coming inside every time someone walks in. What building owners notice over time is that the two sets of doors do not […]

When a warehouse door stops working, the work order names the door. Often the door is the victim. The guides, the header, the anchorage and the concrete around the opening are what actually moved, and until those are dealt with the door will keep failing in the same way no matter how many times it […]

When a storefront door starts dragging on the floor or catching at the top, the glass usually gets the blame, and sometimes the frame. But on most aluminum storefront doors the part that actually wore out is small, cheap, and buried where nobody looks: the pivot. Centre-hung and offset-pivot doors carry the entire weight of […]

An exit device is the only piece of hardware in a building that is designed around the assumption that the person using it is panicking. Everything about it follows from that: it has to open with a push, anywhere along its length, with no knowledge of how it works and no free hand required. Which […]

The call usually comes in before seven in the morning. Somebody opening up has found glass on the sidewalk, a door that will not lock, and an alarm company report with a time on it. The immediate question is never technical. It is whether the shop can open today. That question has a real answer, […]

The push-button door at a clinic entrance, the swing door into a municipal office, the aluminium pair at the front of a medical building: these are low-energy automatic operators, and they fail differently from everything else on a building’s door schedule. They rarely stop working outright. They drift, and nobody logs a drift. By the […]

A fire door is not a door that happens to be made of steel. It is a tested assembly, and the thing being tested was never the door leaf by itself. It was the leaf, the frame, the hinges, the latch, the closer, the gasketing and the way all of it was installed, evaluated together […]