There are those who believe in a questionable adage. "Don't do today what you can put off until tomorrow." they say, blithely. It's all very well being cheerfully optimistic but trouble has a tendency to strike unannounced. Trouble with industrial doors can strike deeper, with what may be dire consequences, which is why planning a realistic maintenance programme for them is an important loading bay strategy.
It's a fact that industrial doors can go wrong and it doesn't take a degree in engineering to figure out what might befall them. All you need to do is look at your industrial doors' specification. Some, for example, are fitted with spring and cable break devices. These aren't there for decoration and it's obviously better to be forewarned of possible breakages of this kind by regular inspections as part of a planned maintenance programme.
Much the same goes for industrial roller shutter doors. These usually have a motor cover, which covers a component that can, by definition, fail. Photocells can also let you down, as can remote control devices, timers and induction loops. Not to put too fine a point on it, the bottom line couldn't be easier to understand. Quite simply if industrial doors stop working, so does the workforce that uses them. Moreover, this workforce can be stopped just as effectively – and perhaps for longer – by the consequences of an accident involving industrial doors.
This begs a question concerning how to prevent such things from happening before they become problematic. The answer to this contains three words: inspection, cleaning and lubrication. Preface all three with the word 'regular' and you'll get an idea of how an industrial door maintenance programme ought to be arranged.
By looking at this in a little more detail, we can see how such a programme works. The element of inspection has a clear role: a potential problem, if detected early, can be solved long before it becomes an actual problem. Cleaning and lubrication are equally logical requirements.
The next point concerns the frequency of the checks in an industrial door maintenance programme. Some firms suggest they should be carried out every 90 days. However, there are methods that permit a maintenance programme to be tailored to an individual firm's needs. Establishing a bespoke maintenance programme involves examining two factors. Counting the typical number of door opening/closing cycles per day gives a measure of how hard the doors have to work and the harder they work, the shorter the service interval.
In a similar vein, it is possible to give industrial doors a 'medical'. A detailed examination at the start of a planned maintenance programme can help to give an accurate forecast of the extent of the doors' remaining service life.
In the final analysis, two choices exist. One is to trust to luck, hoping your industrial doors soldier on regardless. This can be costly in terms of possible component failure, mechanism malfunction and consequent losses to downtime and from accidental damage to or by the industrial doors concerned. Alternatively, you could adopt a planned maintenance programme and benefit from industrial doors that are fit for their allotted task. This has a cost too but paying for maintenance and repairs before problems occur offers maximum efficiency, reliability and, of course, peace of mind that all is well in the loading bay. As the Americans say...do the math!
Chase Equipment are a leading international supplier of industrial doors. See our website at Chase Equipment for more information.
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