Can an Existing Door Be Automated?

In most cases you can automate an existing door rather than replace the entrance — and it is usually the cheaper answer by a wide margin. Keeping sound joinery and adding a drive to it is a fraction of the cost of tearing out a shopfront.

The question is whether your particular door is a candidate. Five checks decide it, and the one that fails most often is not the one people expect.

Five checks before you automate an existing door

Leaf weight and width come first, and they are the easy ones. The MCW-100 swing operator handles leaves up to 150 kg and 1200 mm wide, which covers the overwhelming majority of commercial doors already hanging in South African buildings.

Frame condition is the check that actually fails surveys. An operator does not just hang on the frame, it cycles the door thousands of times against it. A frame that is fine for manual use can be too tired to carry powered operation, and fitting a drive to it simply moves the failure somewhere more expensive.

Headroom decides whether the operator housing fits above the leaf. Power is the last: there needs to be a supply at the head of the door, or a sensible route to one. Neither is usually a dealbreaker, but both change the price if they are discovered on installation day rather than at survey.

When to automate an existing door, and when not to

To automate an existing door is the first thing we price, because it is normally the right answer. But it is not always.

If the frame is tired, or the opening is simply the wrong size for what the building now needs, automating it is money spent on the wrong problem. The clearest example: a doorway that needs a wider clear opening than the existing leaf can give. No operator changes the width of a door — that is a case for automatic sliding doors or a telescopic configuration instead.

Where the entrance is an older automatic door rather than a manual one, the conversation is different again: usually an operator swap that keeps the existing shopfront, covered under service and modernisation.

How we automate an existing door, step by step

It starts with a photograph. Send the door and the head above it and we can usually tell immediately whether it is a candidate to automate an existing door, before anyone travels.

The survey confirms the frame, the headroom and the power before we automate an existing door. The fit itself is the short part — most single doors are a same-day job once the operator is on the shelf in Johannesburg. Commissioning sets opening and closing speeds, hold-open time and the safety devices, and handover includes testing manual escape with the power off.

What to add when you automate an existing door

The moment you automate an existing door, several things become available that were not before. Access control is the common one — a card reader, keypad or biometric on a door that previously just had a key. Push plates and touch-free activation matter in healthcare. Battery backup keeps it working during load shedding, which is worth deciding now rather than adding later; see automatic doors and load shedding.

Safety sensing is not optional on a powered door, whatever it was before. A manual door that closed slowly on somebody was a nuisance; a powered one is a hazard, which is why presence sensing is commissioned as part of every retrofit — the detail is in automatic door sensors. Requirements for powered pedestrian doors in South Africa are published through SABS.

Automating an existing door, answered

Finding out about your door

Send a photograph of the door and the space above it, with the leaf width and roughly how heavy it is. That is normally enough to say whether you can automate an existing door, and what it would cost.

Request a quote, or talk to a technician.