Types of folding gates and their characteristics

Folding gates are a good alternative if the design of the swing gates is no longer satisfactory. The main reason for their replacement is basically the fact that the sash requires a lot of space for opening.

The main advantage of any folding gate is to save space both outside and inside the room. In addition, the main part of the folding structure is suitable for use in places where a lot of snow falls. Everyone knows how difficult it is to open the swing gates after heavy snowfall.

Folding products are of the following types:

• Sectional.
• Rolling shutters
• Harmonic.

Consider them in order.

Sectional doors are a set of movably interconnected horizontal sections.Sections in a gate intended for residential use, such as a garage door in a private house, usually have an approximate size of 40-60 cm in height and 1.9-9.4 meters in length. Of them are collected gate, height from 1.35 to 4 meters. Usually this is enough to meet the needs of the average resident of a private home.

The principle of operation of such gates is that the guide rails of the gates, installed on the sides of the aperture, continue on the ceiling. Thus, when opening, the gate, slipping along the guides, is placed horizontally on the ceiling above the entrance.

This design has its pros and cons:

• This gate does not occupy a usable area in front of the doorway or inside, on either side of it. The mechanism of their opening is also located at the top, on the ceiling, and the modern owners of garages have not yet come up with ways to store useful things there.
• Of the listed types of folding products, sectional can be recognized as the most sound and heat insulating. The panels are quite large in size. For them, sandwich panels are commonly used, which are connected using loops. In addition, many manufacturers of such products make the edges of the panels figured in the form of a “thorn-groove” lock in order to eliminate blowing and even cover these edges with a sealant.So when the gates are closed, neither cold air nor dust enters the room.

• It is a strong and durable construction, resistant to mechanical stress. Installing such a product once, you will use it for a long time.
• To protect against unauthorized entry, such products are usually equipped with a bolt - a spring bolt. It is suitable if the gate is always locked only from the inside or in a room, for example, the garage has another entrance. To close the door from the outside, a lock type with handles is installed on them, by pulling which you can close or open the gate. From the inside, a cable is attached to the handle, while turning the draw bar from the groove. Such constructions are opened both by the automatic electric drive and manually.

• Depending on the needs of the owner of the garage, windows can be made in sections, and also there can be a built-in wicket door directly in the door leaf so that you can enter the room without opening the whole gate. Although it increases the cost of construction.
• Security measures for automatic designs arethat they are usually equipped with photovoltaic cells: the canvas stops moving if something is between the floor and the edge of the gate. Also, some manufacturers equip the sandwich panels with special devices, eliminating the pinching of fingers between the door panels.

The main disadvantage of such a device can be considered that the room should be spacious. Its length must be at least one and a half times the height of the opening, otherwise the gate will simply not fit. They are also quite expensive.

Rolling shutters or rolled structures consist of plastic or metal narrow lamellae flexibly bonded to each other. The principle of their work is that the flexible leaf of the gate, sliding along the guide profiles, rises and winds on a special drum located at the top of the opening inside the special box, just as it does with roller blinds.

The advantages of roller shutters are that:

1. They are very simple in operation and installation: some craftsmen, nonprofessionals assemble them independently from suitable strips of metal and plastic, which can be transparent.
2. Rolling shutters are very compact, both closed and open,they do not take place either in the garage or outside it.
3. Rolling gates are quite cheap compared to all other types of gates. In addition, they are very maintainable, replaceable as individual lamellae, and the entire curtain entirely, the drum and the drive is not necessary to change.
4. They neatly and beautifully look and well cover the room from dust.

However, the list of negative aspects of a roller shutter is also impressive and their most unpleasant property is that, because of their compactness, they cannot well withstand mechanical damage, which means that they can be easily cracked, even if Locked or latched.

Also, the lamellas of such gates have a limitation on thickness and width, there are many of them, the occurrence of gaps in the places of fastenings is possible, because of this their thermal insulation turns out to be rather doubtful. At temperatures below zero, the surface of the gate may become covered with ice, and this makes it difficult to open them. Thus, the use of roller shutters turns out to be limited, for example, by protected garage complexes and premises for which the vulnerability of such a structure will not be critical.

"Accordion" today is quite popular. The canvas of such a door consists of vertically arranged panels interconnected by hinges and sealed with some kind of flexible material - rubber or cloth. A sealing tape or, for example, a nylon brush is also mounted at the top and bottom. At the time of opening and closing, the rollers mounted on the vertical ends slide along a guide rail, which can be located both in the upper part of the aperture and in its foundation.

In the case of mounting the guide rail (guide rail - for industrial models) in the upper part of the aperture, its height should be limited to 4.5 meters. Thus, open structures can be placed both outside and inside the room, depending on which corners of the panels interact with the guides. The width of the aperture, in this case, affects mainly the number of panels, although with a folded gate, it narrows somewhat.

In everyday life, in residential premises, the design of doors in the form of a folding accordion has been used for a long time precisely to save space and eliminate the “dead zone” in the room, which is necessary for opening and closing the door.In turn, the accordion gates have long and successfully been used in large garages, workshops of enterprises, in premises intended for the storage of large-sized equipment and equipment - train depot, aircraft hangars, at industrial enterprises; but they very slowly and reluctantly penetrate into private households as entrance gates or garage doors.

Although the design has indisputable advantages, and folk craftsmen-masters successfully master their manufacture with their own hands. Recently, a growing number of companies that make such gates to order turnkey.

Accordingly, the advantages of the design include:

1. Such tilt-and-fold gates can be used to block an aperture of any width: the folded design will take not so much of the opening as a result.
2. These structures can be folded both inwards and outwards from the opening. The minimum space required to open the structure will be equal to the width of one panel leaf. Accordingly, the resistance of the “accordion” to wind loads is much higher than that of a swing gates of the same size.
3. Gate-harmonicas are perfect in cases where it is undesirable to load the upper part of the opening: the weight is distributed so that all the load falls on them only on the walls.
4. Being made of suitable materials, the door-accordion can provide good sound and heat insulation.

Among the disadvantages of this design can be called the difficulty of installing systems against penetration: not every lock is suitable for a folding structure. In addition, during intensive use, the seal between the panels is damaged: the design of the door provides for much greater tension on the folds than, for example, for the seal between the panels of sectional doors.

Warm products for giving can be folded and folding. Their chain mechanism is very convenient and adjustment takes place in several movements.

And in conclusion, we present a comparison of different types of gates using a specific task as an example. So, to close the opening with a width of 12 and a height of 6 meters, you can use any type of gate.

At the same time, a swing or sliding gates will require at least 6 meters on each side of the opening.For sectional doors, as we remember, above the door you need to allocate an area the size of the opening itself for the installation of guide rails and a drive.

Rolling structures of this size will require a powerful drive and a fairly large box under the drum. At the same time, an accordion-type gate will occupy, depending on the material, approximately one square meter to the left and to the right of the opening. It is important that such gates can, if necessary, be opened manually by one person successively along one panel-sash, while opening similar sectional or rolling structures alone is simply impossible.

What are the garage and street gates, see the following video.