As mentioned in one of our recent blog posts, 15% of all powered roller shutter garage doors in the UK are unsafe and not fit for purpose. The Door & Hardware Federation (DHF) represents the UK’s leading suppliers and installers of domestic garage doors and were recently featured on the BBC TV show, ‘Don’t Get Done, Get Dom’.
Technical specialist, Nick Perkins from DHF, was invited onto the programme to give expert advice on a homeowner’s automatic garage door that was not fit for purpose. The garage door had failed to stop descending when something was obstructing the door; in this case it was the homeowner’s car. He had to pay for the door to be repaired by the non-DHF member company that originally fitted the door. Eventually, he had a new garage door installed by a different company who is a member of the DHF Garage Door Group.
The homeowner filmed the garage door and the condition it was in, when Nick Perkins examined the footage of the original door he told Dom Littlewood:
“This made me cringe; you can imagine someone losing a finger. This door was not fit for purpose and would not have been safe or legally compliant.”
He said the DHF is aware of
“a high number of substandard doors in the market at the moment. We are working with Trading Standards to address this problem. As many as a third of the garage doors on the market are indeed not fit for purpose and are not safe.”
On the programme, Nick Perkins advised viewers that there are three ways of ensuring their automatic garage door is fit for purpose and is safe:
- Use of the ‘hold to run’ function where a button or switch placed in direct view of the door has to be held down to enable the garage door to continue ascending and descending.
- If the door opens or closes automatically at the touch of the button then there needs to be a sensitive edge at the bottom of the door or an intelligent drive unit that will halt and retract the door if it encounters an obstacle.
- If the garage door is on a timer and is set to close after a predetermined time, then there should be both leading edge touch sensitivity and a light detection beam across the garage entrance.
For more information on domestic garage door safety visit the DHF website: www.dhfonline.org.uk. You can watch the full episode of ‘Don’t Get Done, Get Dom’ via the BBC iplayer.
