Time release door holdback hooks?
I have a hotel. Doors keep getting left open, it wastes a fortune of precious heat!
People hook the (exterior) doors open for a myriad of reasons, the most obvious one is to enable easy in/out while they load/unload luggage. Afterwards the door is forgotten.
Removing the hooks is never going to work as humans will always improvise…grab a rock, or chair, or rubbish bin and prop the door open anyway.
What I am after is a holdback that releases after 5 minutes. Giving people the time to do what they need and then…click…the door swings shut again.
We have magnetic holders on our smoke stop (interior) doors with 24v electromagnetic holders. Alarm goes off…click…they all swing shut.
Has anyone any ideas?
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Replies
I don't know about ones that will stay open for five minutes, but both the hinge and arm type delayed action closers keep the door open for about a minute.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-Delayed-Action-On-A-Door-Closer
I used to have datacenter customers that would prop doors open while bringing equipment in and out. Obviously all your fancy security is out the window while the door is propped open soooo... I setup the card access system to give a “prealarm” after the doirvwas held open for something like 30 seconds. The alarm was an annoying horn that would get the customer to remove their door stop.
You can easily implement something like this. Use an alarm-type door switch, a time delay relay (grainger has these), and a loud buzzer or horn. The door opens, the time delay relay starts it’s cycle. If the time delay times out before the door is closed (which resets everything), the relay turns the annoying buzzer on until the door is closed. Time delay re,aye are usually adjustable, so you can set whatever amount of “allowed to be propped open” time you want. If the employees might ignore the buzzer, tell them if the door isn’t closed within 30 seconds of the buzzer sounding the system calls the cops :-)
The normal emergency exit breaker bars do the opposite of what you want (let the door open after a delay). I’m not aware of anything that closes a door after a delay outside of high level security controls like I use at work, and they’re all expensive (we use a system from Lenel which can be programmed to do what you want).
Bill