Roller Shutter and Industrial Door Insurance

Nothing about industrial door work matters more than how tension is controlled, because getting it wrong kills engineers.

A counterbalance spring holds the weight of a very heavy door. Winding, unwinding, replacing or adjusting it releases or applies that energy, and the tools are winding bars in a confined space with a shutter overhead. The documented fatalities and life changing injuries in this trade come from a winding bar slipping, a spring failing during adjustment, a shutter dropping because tension was released without securing the curtain, a cable failing with an engineer beneath, and an engineer working alone with no way to call for help. None of it is exotic; all of it is familiar to anybody in the trade.

So the method statement is the business and an insurer will want it. Correct winding bars in good condition rather than improvised tools, the curtain secured mechanically before tension is released, a defined procedure for spring replacement, two people on spring work rather than one, exclusion of anybody beneath a door being worked on, and a rule about lone working on tensioned components. A business that can describe its spring procedure in detail is presenting the one control that decides whether somebody goes home.

A powered industrial door is a machine in a doorway used by people who are not operating it, which is where the third party claims come from.

A door in a loading bay, a car park entrance, a shop front or a service yard closes on a schedule, on a sensor, or when somebody presses a button they cannot see the door from. The realistic incidents are a door closing onto a vehicle, onto a pedestrian walking through, onto a forklift mid-load, and in a car park onto a child. The safety devices are the only thing preventing it: photocells, safety edges, light curtains, force limitation and in some cases interlocks. All of them can be bypassed, and all of them get bypassed to keep a door working when a part is on order.

So the discipline is that a door with a defeated safety device does not go back into use. Safety devices tested and the results recorded at every service, force measured rather than judged on powered doors, nothing bypassed as a temporary measure, a door immobilised rather than left working if a safety device cannot be restored, and that decision communicated in writing to the customer who will press to have it working. The service record is what gets read after an incident, and a note saying a photocell was bypassed is the end of the argument.

Some of the doors in this trade are not doors at all in insurance terms; they are part of a building's fire strategy.

A fire shutter or fire curtain closes an opening in a compartment wall on a fire alarm signal, and the building's fire strategy assumes it will. If it does not close, because the alarm interface was never connected, the release mechanism failed, the shutter was obstructed, the fusible link was painted over, or a drop test was never carried out, then a compartment that was supposed to hold does not. That is a fire safety failure rather than a broken door, and it sits in a market that has restricted fire related cover significantly since the building safety failures.

So two things follow. Treat fire shutters as a separate discipline with their own testing regime: drop tests carried out and recorded, the alarm interface tested by activating the alarm rather than shorting a terminal, obstruction checks, and a clear record of what was tested and when. And check with your broker whether fire related claims are covered, restricted or sub-limited, because a business installing and maintaining fire shutters under a policy that excludes fire safety claims is uninsured for the thing most likely to matter.

Most of this trade's work is on equipment somebody else installed, and a maintenance contract transfers responsibility for its history.

A door on a service contract may have springs installed twenty years ago with an unknown cycle count, cables that have been replaced badly, safety devices that were bypassed before you arrived, a fire interface that was never connected, a curtain damaged by vehicles and straightened, and a control panel modified by an electrician. From the day you hold the contract, a failure is examined against what a competent maintainer should have found, and the fact that you did not create any of it is a weak answer.

So the takeover survey is worth more than the first year's fee. A written condition report on every door at the start of a contract, listing springs and cables and their apparent age, safety devices and whether they function, fire interfaces and whether they were tested, and remedial work recommended with priorities. Give it to the client and keep their response. Where remedial work is declined, restate it at every subsequent visit rather than carrying it, and where a door is unsafe, take it out of use rather than noting a concern.

Spring work and safety devices decide this one. We are an FCA regulated broker and will not tell you we are the best choice. These are the questions that decide it.