Roller Shutter Door Motorisation and Automation in Cape Town

Motorising a roller shutter door in Cape Town raises two questions that inland jobs do not. Is the door balanced, and will the drive and its control gear survive where they are going to be mounted. We assess both before quoting.

Roller shutter door motorisation in Cape Town

We automate existing manual doors and supply new doors motorised from the start. The drive is chosen on door mass, span, cycle count and exposure.

• Tube motors inside the barrel, which on the coast has the useful side effect of keeping the drive out of the salt air.
• Side-mounted gear motors for heavy industrial curtains and high cycle counts.
• Three-phase drives where the site has the supply and the door has the duty.
• Manual override on every installation, tested before we leave.

Control gear in a marine environment

On a coastal building the panel fails before the motor does. Salt gets into terminals, corrodes contacts and creeps along cabling. We use sealed enclosures with a proper ingress rating, make entries off correctly rather than leaving a gland half tightened, mount gear on the sheltered side where the layout allows, and specify stainless fasteners on the enclosure itself. Cheap control gear near the sea is a fault every few months.

Sizing a drive against wind load

A door on an exposed elevation is not only lifting its own mass. In a strong south easter the pressure on the curtain adds load on every cycle, and a drive sized to the static mass will run hot. On the windward suburbs we size up and specify wind locks, so the curtain is held in its guides by the door rather than by the motor.

Automating an existing manual door

Before anything is fitted we check the barrel, the tension components, the guides and the curtain edge. On the older Epping and Salt River stock it is common to find a door that has been hauled open by hand for decades and needs the barrel assembly rebuilt before a motor is worth fitting. That is priced separately and stated plainly.

Access control on apartment and complex basements

Basement shutters in the City Bowl, Sea Point, Green Point and Century City cycle constantly and are used by residents rather than trained staff. They need multi-user remotes with the ability to delete a single unit, an interface to the building access system where one exists, and a manual release that a resident can operate in the dark during an outage.

Safety devices on automated doors

An automated door needs a safety edge, and on any opening the public or residents walk through it needs photocells as well. These are not optional extras on our quotes.

Power failures and backup

Every automated door we install has a manual release an untrained person can operate under pressure. On buildings where the gate is on backup and the basement door is not, we quote backup for the door as well, because half a solution strands people either way.

What roller shutter door automation costs in Cape Town

The quote separates the motor, the control gear and its enclosure, the safety devices, the electrical work and any door repair needed first, so you can see where the money goes.