Sliding
Automatic sliding doors for buildings that never stop
Single or bi-parting automatic sliding doors driven by our MC-125 operator, with clear openings from 1450 mm to 5000 mm and leaves up to 150 kg. Tested to one million cycles, assembled in Johannesburg, installed and serviced nationwide.
Where they fit
The default choice for a busy entrance
Automatic sliding doors suit any entrance where people arrive with their hands full, in a steady stream, or in both directions at once.
Timber leaves are automated on the same operators, within the same weight and width limits — see wooden automatic sliding doors for what a wooden leaf has to satisfy.
Retail and shopping centres, hospitals and clinics, hotels, office receptions and food outlets all end up on sliding doors for the same reasons: nothing swings into the path of someone walking through, the opening clears quickly, and the door takes a very high cycle count without complaint.
They are also the easiest of the four door types to make accessible. There is no leaf to pull against, which matters for a wheelchair user, somebody with a trolley, or a parent with a pushchair.
Configurations
Single, bi-parting or telescopic
Single sliding runs one leaf to one side. It is the simplest and cheapest arrangement, and it needs as much wall to park in as the leaf is wide.
Bi-parting splits the opening and runs a leaf each way. Each leaf only travels half the distance, so the door clears faster — which is why most centre entrances use it.
Telescopic nests two leaves a side, fitting a wide clear opening into a short track. The MC-125 is available in a telescopic configuration where the facade will not give a standard leaf room to park. There is a fuller explanation on our telescopic sliding doors page.
The operator
MC-125 specification
Every set of automatic sliding doors we supply runs on the MC-125, which we import and assemble at our Laser Park facility in Johannesburg.
Clear opening from 1450 mm to 5000 mm.
Leaf weight up to 150 kg.
Tested to one million cycles.
24-month warranty on the operator.
Telescopic configuration available.
Assembling locally is what puts belts, rollers, floor guides, sensors and controllers on a shelf in Johannesburg rather than six weeks away on a container, and it is the reason a worn part is usually a same-week repair. Full detail is on the MC-125 operator page.
Sensors and safety
What actually keeps the door safe
An automatic sliding door is only as safe as its sensors. Activation sensors open it as somebody approaches; safety sensors hold it open while anyone is still in the opening.
Both drift over time. They get knocked by trolleys, dust over, and lose coverage as the way people use an entrance changes. That is why we test sensor coverage at every service visit as routine work rather than only after a complaint, and why we set coverage on site at commissioning instead of accepting the factory defaults.
Speeds, hold-open time and cushioning are set the same way — against the traffic the entrance actually carries.
Afterwards
Keeping them running
Wear on automatic sliding doors tracks cycles rather than the calendar. A centre entrance running several thousand operations a day and a back-office door on identical hardware need completely different service intervals.
As standard we service an automatic door every six months, and in high-traffic areas more often. Belts stretch, rollers flatten, floor guides fill with grit and sensors drift — all cheap to correct on a planned visit, expensive when an entrance fails on a Saturday morning. A well-maintained door should give around 20 years of service. We service automatic sliding doors from other manufacturers alongside our own. Requirements for powered pedestrian doors in South Africa are published through SABS.
Before you specify
What decides the specification
Four things move the price and the configuration of automatic sliding doors more than anything else on the drawing.
The clear opening. Not the existing frame — the gap people actually walk through when the door is fully open. Everything else follows from it.
Headroom above the opening. The operator needs room, and the structure above has to carry it plus the leaves. A photograph of the head tells us more than a measurement.
Leaf build and glazing. Frameless, framed or thermally broken, and what glass thickness the leaf carries — both feed straight into the 150 kg per leaf limit.
Power and interfaces. Power at the head of the door, plus any access control, locking, fire alarm or building-management interface the entrance has to work with. Where the opening crosses a compartment line, see fire rated automatic doors.
Where the wall space either side is tight, that is normally the point at which a telescopic configuration becomes the answer instead of a wider single leaf.
Common questions
Automatic sliding doors, answered
How wide can the opening be?
From 1450 mm to 5000 mm of clear opening on the MC-125, with leaves up to 150 kg. Bi-parting clears a wider opening in the same travel because each leaf only moves half the distance.
Are electric sliding doors the same thing?
Yes. Electric sliding doors, automatic sliding doors and powered sliding door systems all describe the same thing — a sliding leaf driven by an overhead operator and triggered by a sensor.
Can you replace an existing operator?
Usually, without touching the glass. Where the frames and leaves are sound, swapping the drive is far cheaper than replacing the entrance.
What happens in a power failure?
That depends on the locking and the building’s escape strategy, which we confirm on survey. Battery backup can be fitted where the entrance has to keep operating or fail safe open.
Comparing quotes
Reading a quotation properly
Compare the scope rather than the total. A quotation for automatic sliding doors should state the opening it was priced against, the equipment it includes and the items it excludes — builders work, structural alteration, electrical supply to the entrance and making good are excluded unless the quotation says otherwise.
Changes after acceptance, to size, configuration, finish, controls or activation, are quoted as a variation before we proceed.
Detection
What the sensors actually do
Two detection types work together on automatic sliding doors: motion to open on approach, and presence to hold the door for somebody standing in the opening. Add safety beams and a force limit and the leaf reverses rather than pushing through an obstruction.
Speed, hold-open time, force and the sensor layout are recorded at handover, so a later adjustment can be compared against how the entrance was commissioned.
Support
After the entrance is handed over
Two things keep the running cost of automatic sliding doors predictable: a 24-month warranty on the operator, and spares held locally so a repair does not wait on an imported part. Wear items are handled through servicing, and a service level agreement sits alongside the warranty without replacing or extending it.
Do you service other manufacturers equipment?
Yes. Where we take over an entrance somebody else installed, we report its condition before committing to a maintenance interval.
How quickly can I get a quotation?
Most quotations go out within two working days of us receiving the opening size and a photograph. Revolving and hermetic entrances are surveyed first.
How often should the entrance be serviced?
Against its cycle count rather than a fixed date. Intervals, response times and what is included are defined in your service level agreement.
Single, bi-parting and the words people use
A bi-parting automatic sliding door system is one where two leaves part in the middle and travel to opposite sides. A single slide moves one leaf to one side. That single choice changes the clear opening you get from a given structural opening, and it changes the operator specification, because a bi-parting system drives two leaves rather than one.
Choose bi-parting where the opening is wide, where two-way traffic meets in the doorway, or where you need a large clear opening without a very long side panel to park a single leaf into. Centre entrances, hospital corridors and main receptions are usually bi-parting for exactly that reason.
A single automatic sliding door system is the other half of that choice. Choose a single slide where the opening is narrower, where there is wall to one side to take the leaf, or where traffic is predominantly one direction. It is the simpler and usually cheaper arrangement.
The vocabulary varies. Sliding door systems, automatic sliding door systems and automated sliding doors all describe the same product on this page. Where the reveal either side is too tight for a single or bi-parting leaf to park, a telescopic arrangement gets a wider clear opening from the same structural width.
In short
Automatic sliding doors at a glance
- Automatic sliding doors are quoted against the opening we measured, not a catalogue price.
- Ask about automatic sliding doors and we confirm the opening, the head and the power position first.
- Automatic sliding doors are installed and commissioned by our own technicians.
- Automatic sliding doors carry a 24-month warranty on the operator.
Send us the opening
Clear opening width and height, a photograph of what sits above it, and whether there is power at the head. We will come back with a configuration and a price for the automatic sliding doors that suit the entrance.
Single slide or bi-parting: the first decision
Automatic sliding doors come in two basic arrangements and the choice is usually settled by the opening rather than by preference. A single slide moves one leaf to one side. A bi-parting pair splits from the centre and moves both ways.
Bi-parting is the right answer on wide openings and on high-traffic thresholds, because each leaf travels half the distance and the entrance clears faster. It also needs parking space on both sides, which is exactly what is missing in a lot of refurbishment work. Single slide is simpler, cheaper and often the only option where one side of the opening carries services, a column or a shopfront return.
The mistake we see most often is specifying automatic sliding doors by clear opening width alone. Clear opening is what the customer walks through. Structural opening is what the builder left. The difference is the leaf parking, and getting it wrong at drawing stage is expensive to fix afterwards.
Leaf weight is what sizes the operator
People instinctively size automatic sliding doors by width. The number that actually determines the operator is leaf weight, and for a glazed leaf that is driven by the glass rather than the frame.
Our standard glazing is 6.38 mm clear laminated safety glass, which is a safety requirement rather than a preference on a powered entrance. A larger leaf in that glass gets heavy quickly, and a unit sized for a light interior door will spend its life working near its limit if it is asked to drive a big shopfront panel. That shows up as a shortened service life rather than an immediate failure, which is why it is worth getting right at specification.
Send us the leaf weight if you know it, or the leaf dimensions and the glass specification if you do not, and we will size it properly rather than guess from the opening.
Where automatic sliding doors are the wrong answer
It is worth saying plainly, because a supplier who only ever recommends the product they sell is not advising you.
Automatic sliding doors need somewhere for the leaf to park. Where there is genuinely nowhere, a swing operator on the existing door is usually the better answer, particularly in refurbishment where the existing frame is sound. Where an opening is very narrow, automation may add cost without adding much benefit. And on a door that is rarely used, the honest answer is often that a manual door is fine.
We would rather tell you that than sell you an entrance you did not need, because the entrances that cause us problems later are the ones that were never right for the opening.
What the safety systems actually do
Every set of automatic sliding doors we install carries two distinct kinds of sensor, and confusing them is the commonest misunderstanding in this whole product.
Activation sensors detect somebody approaching and open the door. Safety or presence sensors detect somebody standing in the threshold and stop the leaf closing on them. An entrance quoted with activation only is quoted incompletely, and it is a genuine hazard rather than a specification detail.
Both are set at commissioning against the actual opening, and both drift over time. Verifying them is the single most valuable thing that happens during a service visit, even though it produces no visible improvement on the day.
Power failure behaviour is a decision, not a default
What automatic sliding doors should do when the power goes away is a design decision and it should be made deliberately.
An entrance on an escape route has a different correct answer from a back-of-house door, and the answer interacts with the building fire strategy rather than being a property of the operator. Battery backup can hold normal operation for a period, or it can drive the leaves to a safe position and hold them there.
We will ask you which behaviour you want and we will say which we think is right for that opening, but on any door forming part of an escape route your fire consultant carries that decision, not us.
Servicing automatic sliding doors, and why the interval is not annual by default
The service interval on automatic sliding doors is set by cycles and by environment, not by the calendar, and a supplier who quotes you one interval without asking about the building is guessing.
A supermarket entrance opening several thousand times a day is a different machine from an office side door opening two hundred times, even where the operator model is identical. Cycle count drives mechanical wear on the track and carriage; environment drives contamination. Dust, grit and salt all shorten the interval, and a coastal or dust-exposed entrance needs looking at sooner than the same door in a sealed interior.
We set the interval per entrance at commissioning, against the real duty of that door, and we write it down together with the commissioning settings so that a year later nobody is guessing what the opening speed was meant to be.
What we do not do
We do not work on roller shutter doors, and we do not supply, fit, retrofit or service door closers. Pedestrian automatic entrances are the whole of our business, and we would rather be narrow and good at it than broad and vague. Where automatic sliding doors from another manufacturer are already in your building, we are happy to take over the servicing as an independent provider.