With the range of different door types that are available for farm buildings, airplane hangars, and industrial shops, it can be hard to know which is the best fit for your building project. To help clear a few things up, we’ve gathered a list of the four most popular commercial door styles.
We’ll take a look at each door type, evaluate the benefits and disadvantages of each, and see which door type will help you maximize the potential of your building.
Sliding Doors for Farm Buildings and Airplane Hangars
Sliding doors were one of the cheapest door options for many years. Large, single piece door panels roll horizontally on tracks, covering the door opening. These door panels can be combined to create a split in the middle of the opening or can be used alone.
While sliding doors were popular for many years due to their affordability and simplicity, they’ve recently lost their popularity as other door types became more affordable and more convenient door options.
Benefits of Sliding Doors
The primary advantage of a sliding door is its affordability, though this gap has narrowed in recent years. Now, for large door sizes, sliding door prices are highly comparable to the price of a bifold. When you consider the advantages of a bifold door in terms of convenience, sturdiness, and longevity, the price difference quickly becomes negligible.
The second advantage of sliding doors is how they can maximize your clear opening size. Since the door tracks are installed outside the building, they can be designed for a clear opening the size of your building’s wall. (However, the openings are not usually that big.)
Disadvantages of Sliding Doors
Unfortunately, the list of disadvantages for sliding doors is longer than the list of advantages. Notably, they lack ease-of-use, longevity, and energy efficiency.
While it is possible to add an automatic opener to a sliding door, it is usually not practical. This means that the vast majority of sliding doors must be manually opened.
Sliding doors are also susceptible to jamming. Dust and debris, and ice and snow fill the tracks. The door wheels become worn down, and soon, you are left fighting with the door more often than you’d like. This means that sliding doors require frequent upkeep to ensure they will work well when you need them.
When it comes to energy efficiency, sliding doors lose another point. Their design means that it is impossible to ensure a tight seal between the door frame and the building. Sliding doors leave plenty of room for wind and cold to enter the building – a serious problem if you plan to insulate your farm building or hangar.
Overhead Doors for Machine Sheds and Aviation Hangars
Overhead doors are the most familiar door type. Typically used as residential garage doors, they also fill a considerable need for smaller doors on farm buildings. The multi-panel doors roll up into the building on steel or aluminum tracks.
Benefits of Overhead Doors
Overhead doors are usually the most cost-effective option for doors that are less than 20 feet wide. They are easy to find, and most door installers and building suppliers are familiar with pricing and installation of these doors.
Another advantage is the ease of operation. Overhead doors can easily be opened with the push of a button – either via the wall station or remote opener. Smaller door sizes are reliable and don’t generally require much maintenance, making them a convenient option.
Disadvantages of Overhead Doors
While smaller overhead doors are generally reliable, they become more troublesome and less reliable as they grow larger. Height isn’t much of an issue. However, the lack of structural support in an overhead door means that they are not well suited for wider aviation hangar doors.
Their lifespan is also considerably shorter than most other door types. Overhead doors typically only last 10-15 years before they must be replaced, especially when they are used frequently. (For quick comparison, bifold doors often last longer than 20 years when they are built with quality and longevity in mind.)
Like sliding doors, overhead doors are difficult to insulate well. Their multi-panel design means there are many seams and gaps for cold air to squeeze through. In addition, there is no good way to seal the door against the building’s frame. While they do generally seal better than sliding doors, there is certainly room for improvement.
Finally, overhead doors take up valuable headroom inside your building. When trying to maximize the size of your clear opening, it may be worthwhile to consider another door option that provides more headroom without affecting the height of your building.
Hydraulic Door Options for Agriculture and Aviation
Hydraulic doors are one of the newest door types available for farm buildings and aviation hangars. These single panel doors swing outward and upward, providing a large clear opening. Their single piece design provides excellent insulation capabilities but creates significant strain on a building. This strain can cause damage if the building is not properly designed to withstand the load.
Benefits of Hydraulic Doors
Hydraulic doors have a few benefits that make them popular in the commercial door industry. In fact, their large size is one of the biggest advantages (pun unintended). Their design allows for greater flexibility in size, sometimes even covering an entire end wall of a building.
Hydraulic doors generally require the least amount of headroom to mount to the building. Depending on the building style, this can have a significant impact on the size of the clear opening. (Keep reading to find out how a bifold door can also maximize the size of your clear opening.)
Hydraulic doors are also a more energy efficient option than overhead and sliding doors. Their single panel design means that it is easier to insulate and seal effectively.
Finally, if well designed and manufactured, hydraulic doors are a relatively low maintenance option. The hydraulic pump system is the most complicated part of the door system.
Disadvantages of Hydraulic Doors
The biggest disadvantage of a hydraulic door is their high price point. Compared to other door styles, including bifold doors, hydraulic doors are expensive. The hydraulic pump system and engineering required to build the door to meet safety standards means that hydraulic doors are usually more expensive than bifold doors of a similar size.
While the overall design of a hydraulic door has some advantages, it also comes with a few unavoidable problems. The large, single panel door puts significantly more strain on the building than any other door style. This is because the panel extends so far away from the building when fully opened, pulling the door outward and downward from the building. In comparison, a bifold door folds in half as it opens, reducing the cantilever effect significantly.
Increased support and bracing on the building can reduce the impact of the strain caused by a hydraulic door. Alternatively, customers can purchase an additional steel header frame with their door to support the weight of the door. However, both options come with a considerable cost in addition to the cost of the hydraulic door itself.
The design also means that a hydraulic door takes up considerably more space in front of the door when opening. This reduces the amount of usable space in the front of the door for parking, storage, etc. Door users much take extra care to avoid damaging anything parked in front of the building when operating the door.
Bifold Door Options for Farms Buildings and Airport Hangars
When evaluating different door options for agricultural, aviation, and industrial applications, Diamond Doors is still confident in the benefits and advantages of a bifold door.
Folding in half and lifting upward, bifold doors provide convenience that is hard to match. They provide a full width opening without compromising the strength of your building, allowing you to move your equipment through the doorway with ease.
While the basics remain the same, each manufacturer has a different bifold door design. For this article, we’ve focused on the specific advantages of a Diamond bifold door and what a Diamond door can do for your building.
Benefits of Industrial Bifold Doors
At Diamond Doors, we believe that bifold doors take the best part of each door style and put those parts together for a door designed for convenience, simplicity, and reliability.
Maximize Door Size and Headroom
Bifold doors are installed to the face of the building, resulting in much more available headroom inside the building. It creates a larger clear opening than is possible with overhead doors, since you are not limited by headroom inside the building. Plus, with the Diamond Doors self-supporting header system, you can mount the door past the roofline. This enables you to utilize the entire wall of your building as a door.
Affordable Door Option
Another bifold door advantage is their affordability. Contrary to popular belief, bifold doors are an affordable option for large farm building and hangar doors.
Compared to overhead doors, they are a more cost-effective option over 20 feet wide. And, when compared to sliding doors, they are only slightly higher priced for a door that lasts much longer and is far more convenient to use. Finally, they are much more affordable than hydraulic doors and come with many of the same advantages and benefits.
Convenient and Easy to Use Industrial Doors
Diamond bifold doors come are convenient and easy to use. We equip each door with an electric lift motor and wall-mounted controller for easy door operation. (Plus, you can upgrade to the autolock system and remote opener package for access from the seat of your tractor or plane.)
Energy Efficiency and Temperature Control
Bifold doors are one of the best options for energy efficiency. Their two-panel design minimizes gaps and cracks for cold air to sneak in, while the locking system pulls the door frame snuggly against the building.
The Diamond Doors insulation package provides further protection against extreme temperatures by providing consistent insulation across the full width of the door. Here are a few other benefits of our bifold door insulation.
- We offer insulation in R12 (2” thickness) and R16 (3” thickness) depending on your building needs.
- We line each insulation panel with a white aluminum liner to provide a clean finish on the inside of your door.
- For easy installation, we cut each panel to length before shipping, minimizing onsite labour.
- We include weather seals in each insulation package to eliminate airflow around the door frame.
Reliable and Low Maintenance Doors
We build our bifold doors with fewer moving parts to minimize maintenance and improve reliability. This includes features like our greaseless hinges, innovative cable lift system, simple locking systems, and so much more.
This also means that we build our doors to last. We take the quality of each door seriously, using welding techniques approved by the Canadian Welding Bureau to manufacture the door frame. Doors are manufactured with as few moving parts as possible, and each electrical component is fully tested in-factory to ensure that it arrives at your building in working order.
Our bifold doors have a longer lifespan than overhead doors and sliding doors – some of the very first doors that we built over 25 years ago are still in operation today!
Better for Your Building
The design of a bifold door means that it causes significantly less stress than a similarly sized hydraulic door. The two-panel system folds up as it opens, reducing the cantilever effect. The design minimizes the outward pull of the door, which reduces the amount of structural bracing required from the building to support the load of the door.
This makes it a more cost-effective option when retrofitting an existing building or when installing a large door on a new building.
Disadvantages of Bifold Doors
Like any other door style, bifold doors are not the perfect solution for every building need. Here are a few areas where another door option shines brighter.
Bifold doors do require slightly more headroom than a hydraulic door when open. This can limit their usefulness when installed where there is an overhang. However, if there is no overhang, the need for extra headroom isn’t an issue as the self-supporting header allows you to mount the door past the roofline and gain the extra few inches that are needed.
Most bifold door manufacturers use cables or lift straps to operate the door. Lift straps have been gaining attention recently as many cable-lift systems raise concerns about safety and reliability. However, lift straps are not without their own faults. Using another door type, such as hydraulic doors or sliding doors, eliminates this concern altogether.
In comparison, Diamond Doors uses an innovative cable lift system that avoids the most common bifold door lift system concerns. Our system eliminates all cable overlap and unnecessary moving parts, preventing cable failure due to regular wear and tear. It also provides several other advantages. Our cables have a more consistent opening speed, which means they are often faster than lift straps in similar settings, and they are easier to maintain as they don’t require frequent tensioning.
Bifold doors also have a slower opening speed than other door types. Diamond Doors has the fastest standard bifold door opening speed in the industry at 18 ft/min. However, this is still slightly slower than hydraulic doors, and a fair bit slower than overhead doors.
Which commercial door type is best for your building?
The truth is that the best door type of your farm building or airplane hangar depends on your needs. However, we do believe that a bifold door is the best option for most scenarios, as you’ve seen in this article. If you have more questions about the advantages of a bifold door, talk to our team. We are available by email at info@diamonddoors.com or by phone at 866-325-7600. We’re always happy to help.
