Automatic doors are one of those things nobody thinks about until they stop working, usually on the busiest morning of the week. The short answer is that most powered doors need servicing at least twice a year, and some need it four times. Here is how to work out which category yours falls into, and what a genuine service should actually include.
BS 7036 and the guidance from the Automatic Door Suppliers Association set the baseline: powered pedestrian doors should be inspected and maintained by a competent engineer at intervals suited to their use, and for most sites that means a minimum of two visits per year. That is the figure your insurer and your building's fire risk assessment will generally expect to see evidence of.
Frequency scales with footfall, not with the age of the door. A sliding entrance on a busy Stone or Stafford retail unit might see 1,500 to 3,000 operations a day, which is roughly a million cycles a year. A swing door on a small office serving twenty staff might do 200. The first needs quarterly attention; the second is comfortably fine on six-monthly.
On a sliding door, the carriage wheels and the drive belt do the work. Wheels flat-spot and belts stretch, and a stretched belt makes the door hunt for its closed position, which in turn hammers the motor and the controller. Catching a belt at the right time is a modest parts cost. Ignoring it until the controller fails is a different conversation entirely.
Swing operators are harder on their gearboxes, and the spring tension that gives them their fire-door closing force drifts over time. Bottom rollers and floor guides on sliding doors collect grit, and in this part of Staffordshire that means road salt through the winter months on anything facing a car park or a main road. Doors on exposed elevations genuinely do degrade faster than sheltered ones, which is a fair reason to move an entrance from two visits to three.
Safety sensors are the other half of the story. Presence sensors above the door and safety beams in the leading edges drift out of alignment, get knocked by cleaning equipment, or simply fail. A door that opens perfectly can still be unsafe, and that is not something you will notice from behind the counter.
Between visits, the door will usually tell you something is wrong before it fails outright. If you notice any of the following, it is worth a call rather than a diary entry.
A real service is more than a look and a squirt of lubricant. Expect the engineer to isolate the door, inspect and clean the track and rollers, check and adjust belt tension, test the motor and controller, verify opening and closing forces and speeds against the standard, and test every safety sensor by walking the detection field rather than glancing at an LED. Fire-linked doors should be tested against the alarm signal to confirm they fail safe.
You should be left with a written report listing what was checked, what was adjusted, and anything that will need replacing before the next visit. Keep those reports. If there is ever an incident involving your entrance, that paperwork is the evidence that the door was maintained properly.
Prices vary with door type, access, and how many doors are on one site, so treat these as ranges rather than quotes. A single routine service visit on a standard sliding or swing operator typically falls somewhere in the region of 90 to 180 pounds plus VAT, with per-door costs dropping noticeably when several doors are done in one visit. Annual maintenance agreements bundling two visits usually work out cheaper than booking each one separately, and often include a faster response time on breakdowns.
Parts sit outside that. A drive belt or a set of carriage wheels is a relatively minor spend; a replacement control board or motor on an older operator can run into several hundred pounds. That gap is the whole argument for keeping to a sensible interval.
There is no single law that says "service your door twice a year", but the Health and Safety at Work Act, the Workplace Regulations and the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations all require powered doors to be kept safe and in efficient working order. In practice, following BS 7036 and keeping maintenance records is how you demonstrate you have met that duty.
Yes. New installations often need adjustment in the first few months as belts bed in and the building settles, and most manufacturer warranties require documented servicing to stay valid. Skipping year one is a common and expensive mistake.
You can and should keep the track, floor guides and sensor lenses clean, and report anything unusual. Adjusting forces, speeds or sensor settings should be left to an engineer, because getting those wrong makes the door unsafe rather than simply inconvenient.
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