Curtain doors for openings that never rest
High speed doors in Ottawa and Gatineau
A high speed door is a reinforced fabric or rubber curtain on a direct drive motor, clearing a 10 foot opening in about two seconds instead of ten. It exists for one reason. An opening that gets used all day costs money every second it stands open, and a sectional door was never built to cycle that often.
What makes a door a high speed door?
A flexible curtain instead of rigid panels, a direct drive gear motor instead of springs and cables, and a control that tracks curtain position continuously. Those three together let the door move at speeds a sectional door cannot survive.
A sectional steel door is a stack of hinged panels counterbalanced by a torsion spring, and the panels, hinges and rollers are what set the ceiling on speed. Drive that assembly faster and you shorten the life of every part in it. A high speed door replaces the panels with one reinforced curtain that rolls onto a drum at the header. There is no counterbalance spring to unwind, so the gear motor does all the lifting, and an absolute encoder reports curtain position to the control instead of a mechanical limit switch being tripped at each end.
Two families cover most Ottawa buildings. Roll up curtain doors suit interior openings and exterior walls where there is headroom for the drum, typically 20 to 30 inches above the opening plus room beside the jambs for the guides. Folding or bi-parting curtain doors handle tight headroom. Either way the curtain rolls or gathers at the header, so a high speed door asks for far less backroom than a sectional door, whose horizontal track has to run the full height of the door back into the building.
How fast does a high speed door actually open?
Most curtain doors open at 3 to 7 feet per second, against roughly 1 foot per second for a sectional door on a standard operator. On a 10 foot opening that is about 2 seconds instead of 10.
Read the spec sheet closely, because opening and closing speeds are almost never the same number. Closing is deliberately slower on most units, often around half the opening speed, because a fast closing edge is the safety problem and the listing treats it that way. Manufacturers usually publish inches per second rather than feet, so 60 inches per second is 5 feet per second, and that is a fair mid range figure for an interior curtain door.
What matters on site is cycle time, not top speed. Cycle time is open plus dwell plus close, and dwell is the part nobody specifies. A door rated at 6 feet per second that stands open for 8 seconds waiting on a forklift operator is not a fast door in practice, which is why an activation choice such as a loop, a motion sensor or a pull cord changes the real number as much as the motor does. Supply power matters too. The same model on three phase 208 or 600 volt service holds its rated speed under load better than a single phase unit on a long run of undersized wire.
How much conditioned air does a slow door let out?
Enough to read on a January gas bill. Loss scales with open area multiplied by seconds open, so cutting a 10 second cycle to 2 seconds removes about 80 percent of the exposure on every pass.
Run the arithmetic on your own opening. An 8 foot by 10 foot doorway is 80 square feet. Cycled 150 times a shift at a foot per second, counting both directions plus a short dwell, the opening stands clear or partly clear for roughly 20 seconds a cycle, which is about 50 minutes of open door every shift. At 5 feet per second the same 150 cycles cost closer to 10 minutes. In an Ottawa January that difference is felt at the far end of the building before it is ever seen on an invoice.
The rest of the saving is in the seal, and it is the half people forget. A curtain door runs inside side guides fitted with brush or wiper seals and closes onto a weighted bottom bar, so the closed door leaks far less than a sectional door whose side weatherstrip has been scuffed by twenty thousand cycles. If the opening separates two conditioned spaces rather than the building from the weather, the same logic still applies to whichever side is being held at temperature, and in cold storage it lands on the refrigeration load instead of the furnace.
How many cycles a day justifies a high speed door?
Past roughly 50 cycles a day a sectional door and its operator wear faster than their ratings allow. Past 100 the case usually makes itself on downtime and replacement parts before anyone counts the heating.
Put your cycle count against the ratings and the answer stops being a matter of opinion. A standard torsion spring is wound for about 10,000 cycles. High cycle springs are ordered at 25,000, 50,000 or 100,000. A light commercial operator is listed for intermittent duty, not continuous duty, which means it is designed to rest between cycles. At 100 cycles a day a 10,000 cycle spring is finished inside its third year, and the operator that drove it is usually not far behind.
A high speed curtain door is built from the other end. Drum bearings, direct drive gearbox and curtain are commonly rated in the hundreds of thousands of cycles, and the motor is specified for continuous duty. Count real cycles before you decide anything. Fit a counter on the existing operator, or have someone tally a week, because the figure quoted from memory is almost always low. Then price an hour of stopped work in that part of your building, because that number, rather than the door, is what makes or breaks the decision.
What happens when a vehicle hits a high speed door?
The curtain is built to release from its side guides rather than tear or bend. Most units re-seat on the next cycle, and a technician is needed only when the bottom bar or the guides took the damage.
This breakaway behaviour is the biggest practical difference from a sectional steel door. A forklift into a sectional door bends panels, kinks the vertical track and often bends the shaft, which is a parts order and a day or more of downtime on an opening you needed this morning. The same impact on a curtain door normally pops the curtain edge out of the guide, the control reads the fault and stops, and a reset plus one cycle threads the curtain back in. Some designs re-thread on their own. Others need a person holding a button through a slow re-entry cycle. Ask which one you are buying, and ask whether the bottom bar is a crush resistant profile, because that is the part that takes the hit.
Impact tolerance is not a safety device and must never be sold as one. The operator still needs everything its UL 325 listing requires, which means monitored photo eyes at minimum, and on most high speed units a light curtain across the full opening height, because a fast closing edge with a single beam near the floor leaves too much of the opening unwatched. On an exterior opening add wind load to the specification. A curtain door holds pressure through its guides and its bottom bar, and a unit chosen for an interior aisle will not behave the same way on a wall facing an open field in February.
What wears out on a high speed door, and how often?
The curtain edge, the bottom bar, the guide seals, the drum bearings and the photo eyes, roughly in that order. On a door running a few hundred cycles a day, plan a service visit quarterly rather than yearly.
Wear tracks cycles, not calendar months, so the maintenance interval belongs in cycles. A door doing 400 cycles a day passes 100,000 cycles inside a year. The same door doing 40 cycles a day takes ten years to get there, and putting both on an annual visit gets one of them wrong. The parts that go first are the ones that flex or rub: the curtain edge where it enters the guide, the wiper seals along both jambs, and the bottom bar once it has absorbed enough contact.
Gearbox and drum bearings are long life items, but they announce themselves early with noise and heat, which is why a listening and temperature check belongs on every visit rather than on a teardown schedule. Photo eyes and light curtains get cleaned and function tested every time, because they are the devices the listing depends on and a dusty lens is an intermittent fault, not an obvious one. Omar sets your interval from the measured cycle count during the site visit, and every visit is backed by our 90 day labour promise in writing. We look after openings across the industrial parks and plazas we cover.
What a visit costs, and what it does not
The service call is $35 to $85 depending on where you are in Ottawa or Gatineau, and it is free with any repair over $250. A high speed door itself is quoted after a site visit, because opening size, headroom, guide clearance, available power and your real cycle count decide the number, and none of those can be read down a phone line. You approve the written price before any work begins.
Omar is the owner operator and a factory trained technician, so the person who measures your opening is the person who stands behind the work. HUSH carries commercial general liability insurance and WSIB coverage, and both certificates go to your property manager or general contractor on request. Labour is covered by the 90 day Done-Right guarantee.
- Every major brand serviced
- Factory-trained
- Insured and WSIB-covered
Same-day service
We carry the common springs, cables, rollers and opener parts on every truck, so most repairs are one visit.
A written price before we start
You get a firm price, quoted before we start and never after, and there is no overtime fee at night or on a weekend.
Guaranteed work
Every repair is backed by our written 90-day Done-Right Promise, parts and labour included.
Factory-trained and owner-operated
factory-trained, owner-operated, and servicing every major garage door and opener brand.
Free estimate, and the service call is free with any repair over $250. Ask about financing on approved credit.
From call to fixed, in 4 steps
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Call or book
Tell us what is happening. We give you a real arrival window.
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We diagnose on-site
A technician inspects and shows you exactly what is wrong.
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You get a firm quote
We price the fix and walk you through your options, before any work.
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We fix it, you test it
Most repairs done the same visit, backed by our 90-day promise.
HUSH guarantees its labour for 90 days
The Done-Right Promise covers our labour for 90 days on every repair. If the work is not right, we come back and fix it free. Premium parts carry their own manufacturer warranty.
We can promise this because most of our repairs are done right on the first visit, so callbacks are rare. On the rare one, fixing it is on us, never you.
A door that stops is a shift that stops.
Call and we will book a site visit, count your cycles and quote the opening in writing.
Same-day, 7 days a week. Open daily, 7am to 9pm.