Summer Slamming Doors
This is an example of the sort of post that documents an issue that might require more internal discussion.
This is about magnetic door stops. This is where we can go off on our experience with holding strength. Videos and pics...
But perhaps, if we are really talking about solutions, this is about control exterior (and interior) doors so they don’t injure people or wake them up in the middle of the night with a loud bang.
Lots of modern houses show themselves open completely to the elements with entire sides of the building ready to welcome in the wind (and birds and bats I imagine). Anyway, client called that they were worried that their doors would hurt someone when the wind picks up and throws doors slamming into their frames. Forget plaster, just the possibility of getting caught by one of these things worried him.
He wanted help securing the doors and thought about magnetic stops.
Now this is the same house where he claimed one of the windows was blown clean off the house and landed, smashing on the patio below. The casement stay question probably needs to be a different post. Just to say, this might be a breezy spot.
Both mechanical connections (hooks) and magnetic (non-electromagnetic) connections to offer.
I think the question about which is going to work best is going to depend on a few things outside of aesthetics, which definitely entered into the final decisions here.
The client felt that if his teenage kids would need to bend down to hook or unhook anything that these doors would never get hooked or unhooked. So, an automatically secured and unsecured option was preferable. So, magnetic, right?
Well, it really depends. My feeling is that holding force on a magnetic stop needs to be quite strong on an exterior door where a heavy door can act like a sail if the wind catches it. I’m sure it there’s a way to figure out the force for a certain mass and area and wind speed but no one will ever make that calculation. Or at least not to spec a door stop.
The offerings we looked at :
Halliday+Baillie :
We actually did an experiment in-house a long time ago which tested the hold force of the single and double magnetic doorstops and found the double was not double. See here. Thanks to David and Ed I think for this study.