So you know those doors that you can hit a button and they swing open for handicapped people and the like? Does opening these doors manually cause any damage to the workings of the door? If you pull hard enough you can open it faster than the motor would, and there is that high-pitched whirring that just sounds like something’s getting broken.
(I’m talking about doors you would walk through, not garage doors or anything special like that.)
Yes,
If you attempt to force the door to open rather than just pushing the button, it can cause damage to the motor. It may not blow it up like in Hollywood, but over a period of time (depenging on usage) the motor will fail.
From personal experience, we had several of these doors in the building in which I worked in Chicago. One of the doors was not used by wheelchaired people very often, so the walkers would push and pull like mad on the door. Eventually, the owners of the building had to replace the entire door. Within less than one year, the mechanism had to be replaced about three times, and at least once a week, you would see the maintenance techs working on it. Even though a sign clearly advised people to push the button and not the door.
Assuming you are talking about swinging rather than sliding doors, I think most of these doors are designed to be pulled/pushed open. You pull a little on it and the motor kicks in. Once the motor kicks in let it go. If it breaks when opend without pushing a button then it is badly designed.
It also depends on the door’s design. Some doors are meant to be opened manually with only occasional use of the power feature. My dad used to service some of these doors on the U of M (Minnesota) campus before he retired and it drove him nuts when someone would push the handicap button to open the door for them because they were carrying A book. He would always tell them that the door opener is for the physically handicaped, not mentally handicaped. Eventually the most used of these doors were replaced (at great expense, places like the “U” can’t do things economically). More doors in public locations are being replaced (around here) with fully automatic opening doors. Apparently it’s cheaper in the long run to replace the whole system for these places.
There are two types of automatic door openers, one where the motor is always engaged, and another newer type which has a clutch which engages when you press the touchpad. The first type requires you to manually make the gears rotate,which makes it harder to open,AND you hear the gears rotate.You can eventually screw this up. The second type,when not energized, works only as a doorcloser.Thus it is harder to bust. Although I’ve noticed that eventually kids figure out a way to bust anything we install, bless their hearts!
What we need are those talking doors from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.
Please Bob no!
The hackers at MIT already retrofitted a couple elevators in an almost Sirius way. I suppose it won’t be long until they do a door, or a building.
Ben
Just a quick peeve: Why can’t the forum automatically translate an <a href=""></a> into the relevant bracket BS? There have to be a lot of users to whom HTML is standard. It’d be relatively easy to only accept the desired HTML commands. The square bracket thing is just annoying.