Automatic Doors and Load Shedding: What Actually Happens

Automatic doors and load shedding is a South African problem with a South African answer. Most automatic door literature is written for countries where mains power is assumed. Here it is not, and that changes how an entrance should be specified — not just what it costs.

This is what actually happens to an automatic entrance during load shedding, what battery backup does and does not buy you, and the one decision that should never be made on site.

What happens to an automatic door during load shedding

Three different things can happen during load shedding, and they are often confused with each other.

During scheduled load shedding on an entrance with battery backup, the operator and the electric locking keep running. The door behaves normally, or parks in whatever state you agreed when it was commissioned — usually closed and locked out of hours, or held open if the building still has to move people.

During an unplanned outage on an entrance without backup, the operator stops driving. This is the moment that matters: the door must still be openable by hand. A powered pedestrian door that cannot be pushed or broken out when it is dead is not an inconvenience, it is a life-safety problem.

When power returns, the operator re-learns its opening width and resumes. An entrance that repeatedly fails to re-learn after an outage is telling you something about the drive or the controller, and it is worth a service call before it fails properly.

What battery backup buys you during load shedding

Battery backup is the single most useful thing you can specify for a South African entrance, and it is also the most oversold. It is sized to carry the operator and the locking through a load shedding block. It is not a generator, and it is not intended to keep a building trading through a full stage-6 block.

Note the last row. Manual escape is available in both columns. Backup improves convenience, security and access control continuity. It is not what makes the entrance safe — the mechanical breakout does that, and it works whether or not anything is powered.

Where an entrance is on a building management system or an access platform, backup also keeps the door honest through load shedding: readers stay live, schedules keep running, and you do not arrive in the morning to a door that has forgotten who is allowed through it. That integration is covered on our automatic door access control page.

Fail-safe or fail-secure: the decision to get right

Every electrically locked entrance has to answer one question: when the power dies, does the lock release or hold?

Fail-safe unlocks on power loss and is the default for anything on an escape route. Fail-secure stays locked, and is only appropriate where escape from that area is served by another door. Getting this backwards produces either a building you cannot get out of, or a building that unlocks itself every time the grid drops.

This is a fire and life-safety decision. We set it with the fire contractor and against the requirement stated for the building, rather than picking it on the day of installation. Standards for powered pedestrian doors in South Africa are published through SABS.

Specifying an entrance for load shedding

If you are buying a new entrance in South Africa, four things are worth deciding up front rather than retrofitting later.

Battery backup on the operator. Cheap at the point of specification, awkward and more expensive to add afterwards. Both the MC-125 sliding operator and the MCW-100 swing operator support it.

The parked state. Decide now what the door should do when it goes onto battery: stay live, close and lock, or hold open. It is a business decision, not a technical one, and it differs between a pharmacy and a warehouse.

Locking behaviour. As above — and record the decision somewhere, because the person who services the door in three years will not be the person who specified it.

Surge protection. Repeated load shedding means repeated restarts, and restarts are hard on controllers. This is the failure we see most often on entrances in areas with frequent shedding.

Automatic doors and load shedding, answered

Getting it specified properly

If you are unsure what your current entrance does during load shedding, the fastest way to find out is to ask us to look at it. If you are specifying a new one, send the opening size and tell us what the building has to do during an outage — that single sentence changes the specification more than anything else on the enquiry form.

Request a quote, or read our 2026 automatic door price guide for what a commercial entrance costs in South Africa.