Questions We Get Asked

Only Charlotte. The round depends on short drives between stops, and the moment it stretches to the surrounding towns the frequency drops for everyone already on it. If your building is outside the city we will tell you on the call rather than after.

It depends almost entirely on cycles, not on the calendar. A back-of-house door opened forty times a day and a main entrance opened eight hundred times a day are not the same maintenance problem even if they were installed the same week. High-traffic entrances tend to want three or four visits a year. Interior and low-use openings are often fine annually. Labelled fire door assemblies are a separate matter — NFPA 80 calls for annual inspection with the results documented and retained.

Nothing, at the start. Most buildings begin with one visit that walks every opening and produces a list. Whether that becomes a recurring round is a decision made after you have seen the list, not before.

Sometimes not, and we would rather say so. But 'fine' usually means 'still opening'. The first walk-through on a building that has never had one typically finds closers out of adjustment, a couple of leaves dragging, missing or painted-over fire labels, and at least one exterior door with daylight around it. None of that stops the door working. All of it costs money somewhere else.

That is nearly all of them. Service work is almost entirely on openings somebody else put in, often decades ago, frequently with hardware that has been swapped piecemeal over the years. Working out what is actually on a door is the first part of the job.

Two labels are normally involved: one stamped into the edge of the leaf on the hinge side, and one set into the frame rebate. If neither exists, the assembly was most likely never rated to begin with. What your wall is supposed to have, as distinct from what it does have, is a drawings question and an inspector question. We are neither.

Yes, and it is extremely common. A label that cannot be read cannot verify the assembly, and it turns up as a finding. What can be done about it is limited and depends on the manufacturer and the inspector — it is not something a service technician can simply re-create, and anyone offering to is doing you harm.

We record label condition and obvious deficiencies during maintenance visits, and we will tell you what we see. A formal NFPA 80 annual inspection with a retained record is a defined process with its own scope, and where that is what you need it gets discussed as its own piece of work rather than folded into a round.

Almost certainly not the way it is being imagined. Openings in a required egress path generally have to release with a single motion and without a key, tool or special knowledge, and adding a second locking device after inspection is one of the most frequently cited violations there is. The propping problem is real and worth solving — just not that way.

Not usually, and this is one of the more common turnover findings. Closers routinely arrive set heavier than the finished building needs, and the finished condition — with carpet down, gasketing on and the air handling running — is not the condition they were set in.