European Door and Shutter Federation: Working Group "Service & Maintenance" set a common standard

In February 2011 the E.D.S.F. Working Group "Service & Maintenance" continued his work in finding a common approach in the frequency of maintenance needs and the qualification level of service providers/personal. Due to the fact of too many unsafe doors in the market - approx. 60 - 70% of the power operated doors are not maintained at the moment - and that the legislative framework is currently not well known within customers, E.D.S.F. has to be pro-active in awareness building.

Therefore E.D.S.F. defined a draft guideline which should help manufacturers, owners and users to fulfil their tasks and improve the understanding for a regularly service. As a result E.D.S.F. proposes that maintenance should be conducted at minimum once per year for all power operated doorsets. For doorsets placed on the market before 2000 the maintenance should always include risk assessments in order to update the doorset - a proposal to upgrade could including components as e. g. drives, control units or implementation of a new door/gate - according to the state of the art (technology) to ensure the requirements of safety and reliability are met. For doorsets placed on the market after 2005 a risk assessment could be necessary, minimum checks according the E.D.S.F. checklist are required once a year. This is very valid for equipments in the building where the use of the doorset (e. g. traffic behaviour and intensity) has changed after the products have been installed.

Additionally the Working Group defined the qualification of professional service provider and its employees (service engineers) because today there are gaps in the standards and regulations concerning the qualification of professional service provider/ technicians. Beside that there are no regulations defined how to become a service provider or service engineer. To handle this in the future clearly E.D.S.F. wants to: implement its definitions in the current review of the product standard, develop an EU qualification course/ program and gets in contact with the EU-Commission to influence the harmonization of the legislative framework over Europe in Service & Maintenance. With this activities E.D.S.F. wants to raise the safety standard in the market.

Sustainability

Parallel to this Working Group "Service" the E.D.S.F. is also active in the topic "sustainability". With the Working Group "Sustainability" a common calculation method for energy losses of buildings could be found. With this calculation it came clear that the door/gate parameters U-value, Air-leakage and infiltration (opening time) have a real impact on the energy consumption in correlation to the building type and size. These calculation and the "draft service guideline" will be presented during the General Assembly which will be held this year on the 23^rd and 24^th of May in Madrid.

After a successful General Assembly last year in Stuttgart with the "information exchange platform" for all door/gate-manufactures this years General Assembly will bring more manufactures together for interesting talks. It is additionally planned to found a new Working Group "Fire & Smoke" for finding a common interpretation for the upcoming product standard Fire and Smoke prEN 16034. All interested are welcome. For more information please contact info@edsf.com or look at www.edsf.com.