How long should an automatic door stay open?

Installing automatic doors into your premises is a great way to improve the accessibility of your property, particularly for the assistance of any disabled customers or employees as they enter the building. 

Automatic doors provide an affordable way to upgrade your premises, and improve both the professionalism and accessibility of your building. However, a malfunctioning automatic door can be a bit of a nightmare. All too often, accidents happen that have been caused by an automatic door acting up.

So, the best way to mitigate this risk is by ensuring that the door is kept open for an appropriate amount of time with safety sensors. Obviously, this needs to be balanced against environmental considerations (there’s no point keeping your doors open for 20 minutes every time someone walks in!). 

So, the question that needs to be asked is, how long should an automatic door stay open?

The majority of automatic door systems in private and public buildings operate by using motion sensors. These detect the presence of a person, and then hold open the doors for them to enter. 

For a low energy automatic door (which typically features a button which the user is required to push), the optimum amount of time for the door to stay open is 5 seconds.

So, how long should automatic doors be open?

For doors that are fully automatic (which use sensors to swing open themselves), the amount of time that the doors should stay open is between 2.0-3.2 seconds.

This ensures that an appropriate level of safety for users has been considered, particularly with regards to individuals with a disability, who may require extra time to go through the power operated door. This automatic time for the door can be adjusted, with controls allowing for the time to be modified by up to 50 seconds.

Automatic doors come in a wide variety of options, including revolving doors, swinging or sliding doors. At Access Innovations, we provide an extensive range of automatic doors, including speed doors and we ensure that every single model in our range adheres in full to UK safety regulations.

Each installation request that we undertake is completed to the highest quality, and our state of the art products incorporate the full range of appropriate safeguards for the safety sensing devices that we use. So, if you would like to enlist our services for an automatic door installation for your property, do not hesitate to get in touch.