The front of the building
Entrance Door Installation and Service in Charlotte, NC
Tell us whether the entrance needs adjusting, new hardware, or a new leaf and frame. Call (984) 253-8579.
Closer sweep timer
Times a door's closing sweep and compares the result against the 5-second minimum that section 404.2.8 of the 2010 ADA Standards sets for travel from 90 degrees open to 12 degrees from the latch.
- Open the door to roughly 90 degrees and let go.
- Press Start as you release it.
- Press Stop when the leaf is about 12 degrees off the latch — roughly a hand's width from closed.
No time recorded yet. The pass mark is printed below: 5 seconds or more from 90 degrees to 12 degrees, per 2010 ADA Standards §404.2.8. A phone stopwatch measures the same thing.
| Provision | Figure |
|---|---|
| §404.2.8 — closing sweep, hinged door | 5 seconds minimum from 90° open to 12° from the latch |
| §404.2.8 — spring hinges | 1.5 seconds minimum from 70° open to closed |
| §404.2.9 — opening force, interior hinged door | 5 lbf ceiling, excluding the force needed to retract the latch bolt |
| §404.2.9 — exterior hinged doors | No stated maximum; wind and pressure differentials make a single figure meaningless |
Fire-rated openings answer to the authority having jurisdiction rather than these figures. A door that snaps shut smartly reads as healthy and frequently is not — the sweep valve governs this measurement.
The front door is a consumable and nobody budgets for it that way
An entrance is not a door in the sense that an office door is a door. It is a machine that runs several hundred cycles a day, in weather, with a pressure difference across it, operated by people who have no reason to be careful with it and frequently have their hands full. Every one of those conditions is hostile to hardware, and they stack.
The result is that entrances fail on a schedule that has nothing to do with the building's age and everything to do with footfall. A South End restaurant vestibule and a suburban office lobby with the same doors from the same year are not comparable openings, and treating them as one line item on a maintenance budget is why one of them is always broken.
Entrance work we take on
Manual entrance openings — aluminum stile-and-rail entrances, hollow metal exterior leaves, and the inner and outer lines of a vestibule. Anything with a sensor header, a swing operator or a slider belongs to an automatic door contractor and we will say so on the phone rather than after the visit.
Closers on exterior openings
The single most common entrance complaint and the one most often mis-solved. An exterior door fights wind load and building stack pressure, so a closer sized for an interior opening will either be forced open past its arm geometry or cranked up until it becomes a problem in its own right. ANSI/BHMA A156.4 Grade 1 units are tested to two million cycles, and a Grade 1 closer failing in two years is nearly always a sizing or mounting problem rather than a product problem.
Offset pivots and floor closers
Common on aluminum entrances and rarely understood by whoever inherited the building. A door on offset pivots that has started to drop or bind is usually a worn bottom pivot or a floor closer whose cement case has taken on water, and the two get diagnosed differently. Floor closer work means lifting the leaf out, which is why it is worth knowing before rather than after.
Thresholds, sweeps and the daylight under the door
Visible daylight at the bottom of an entrance is a service call people postpone for years while paying to condition the air that leaves through it. On exterior openings the threshold is also structural to the assembly's alignment — a threshold whose fixings have loosened will let the leaf sit differently, which shows up as a latching complaint.
Alignment, drop and drag on high-cycle leaves
Aluminum entrance leaves lose square before hollow metal does because the corner joints carry the load. A leaf that catches on the threshold on one side is telling you about its corners, not about the floor. There is a real limit to how many times a racked entrance leaf can be brought back and part of the job is saying when it has been reached.
Locks, cylinders and after-hours securing hardware
Hookbolt and deadlatch hardware on narrow stile entrances, cylinder work, and the panic hardware that egress requirements often put on the same opening. Where an entrance is in a means of egress, whatever secures it still has to release in a single motion from the inside, and combinations that break that rule are among the most frequently written-up findings in commercial buildings.
Vestibule pairs behaving as one assembly
Two door lines with a pocket of air between them interact. Adjust the outer line and the inner line changes behaviour, because the pressure across each leaf shifts. Vestibules get looked at as a pair for that reason, and a vestibule that has been serviced one line at a time by different people over a decade is a recognisable and fixable mess.
Commercial door installation and replacement
Installation here means a new door going into an opening that already exists — a replacement leaf, a replacement frame, or both, with the hardware sized for the entrance rather than matched to whatever came off it. Cutting new openings into a structure is a different trade and is not what this is.
A new leaf in an existing frame
The common case and the one that goes wrong most often. A frame that is square, properly anchored and undamaged will take a new leaf without argument. A frame that has moved will hand the new door exactly the problem the old one had, so the frame gets measured and checked before anything is ordered.
Frame and leaf replaced together
Where the anchors have failed in the wall, the frame has been struck out of square, or the opening has been field-modified past the point of correcting. It is a longer job with a lead time on the material, and it gets scheduled rather than folded into a visit.
Thresholds, sweeps and weatherstripping
Fitted new once the daylight under the door has stopped being closeable by adjustment. On an exterior entrance this is also the thing keeping water off the bottom rail, which is what decides whether the next conversation is about a sweep or about a leaf.
Hardware fitted new on an existing door
Closers sized against leaf width, weight and exposure rather than matched to the old unit, plus pivots, locksets and exit devices. Grades, tiers and the rebuild-versus-replace question are set out on the component page.
What does not get installed here
Automatic and power-operated entrances, overhead sectional and coiling doors, and tempered glass itself, which is a glazier supply item. Those are named on the phone rather than discovered on the day.
Whether an opening is repaired or replaced is not settled on the phone. What usually decides it is a leaf that has lost its flatness, a frame whose anchors have let go, or a labelled assembly that has been modified past correcting — and until somebody has looked, an adjustment and a replacement are both still on the table. The repair side of that sits on the page covering what a door is doing and what it usually means.
What decides the figure on an entrance
| Variable | Why it moves the number |
|---|---|
| Whether the frame or threshold is in scope | Hardware is a visit. Frame and threshold work is a job, sometimes with the opening out of service for part of a day. |
| Surface closer versus floor closer | One is worked on standing up. The other means removing the leaf and opening the floor. |
| Whether the leaf has lost square | A racked aluminum leaf can sometimes be brought back and sometimes cannot, and the honest answer changes the whole scope. |
| Finish matching on visible hardware | A front entrance is seen by every customer, so a functionally fine mismatched part is often not acceptable and ordering to match adds lead time. |
No figures are published. Two entrances that look identical from the pavement can differ by an order of magnitude once the threshold comes up.
How entrances get handled here
Entrances get treated as high-cycle from the first question
The traffic estimate comes before the make and model, because it decides whether this is a repair or a hardware grade that was wrong from the start.
Sizing gets checked, not assumed
A replacement closer that matches the old one exactly is only correct if the old one was correct, and on entrances it frequently was not.
The vestibule is worked as one system
Both lines, together, with the pressure between them accounted for.
Aluminum entrance stock in one city is a knowable thing
Charlotte's commercial entrances came from a limited set of systems, which is exactly why staying inside the city makes the van's contents worth something.
Egress rules get respected on the front door
Single-motion release from the inside is not negotiable, and no securing arrangement gets fitted that breaks it however convenient it would be.
Automatic openings are handed off, not attempted
Named plainly here so nobody discovers it on the day.
How an entrance call runs
- 1. Describe it on the phone
Where the entry is, roughly what traffic it takes, and whether it is dragging, not latching, not closing, or letting weather in.
- 2. Parts pulled for the likely cause and the runner-up
Closer sizes, pivot sets, threshold and sweep stock, and cylinder parts if securing hardware is in the description.
- 3. The whole assembly gets read before anything is adjusted
Frame plumb, leaf square, pivot or hinge condition, threshold fixings, closer arm geometry, and how the two vestibule lines behave against each other.
- 4. Fixed, or scoped honestly if it is bigger
You get the finding, the work done, the parts by name, and a plain statement if the leaf or frame is at the end of what repair can do for it.