With so many choices for your business including but not limiting hollow metal, steel, rolling, high speed, impact, gates I’ll give you a few free pointers for choosing the best commercial door to fit what your business needs, while adding value to your operations.

Strong, Secure and Safe

Roll-up commercial doors are appropriate in demanding environments requiring maximum durability and security, such as loading docks or retail environments. Because of minimal backroom, headroom and side room requirements, roll-up commercial doors are able to fit in tight spaces. The actual material of a commercial door will largely impact the total security, as well as Maintenance it will require. Commercial steel doors offer the absolute most security, however business owners find wood, and glass door much more aesthetically pleasing.

The D-Man recommends: Cookson, or Detroit based Mahon Door  each offers an excellent selection of commercial steel doors. Next up in commercial  entry doors offered by the exclusive Total Door Company again based in Pontiac, Michigan you will find the highest quality in specialty doors, or more simply but guaranteed against cracking, splitting, or denting is Dynbar. For sectional fullview window, or fiberglass and steel frames offering hurricane strength doors consider Wayne Dlaton.

High Traffic

Commonly used in the restaurant industry, impact commercial doors swing both ways to allow traffic to flow in and out easily. These swinging doors also make a good choice for commercial entry doors for loading docks.

The D-Man recommends: Chase Doors provides a line of quality industrial, commercial and retail impact commercial doors, also including a selection of options for clear flexible and rigid impact doors.

High Speed

Commonly used in areas which involve high traffic but need to keep with security, and safety is High-Speed fabric doors. These doors are virtually damage proof. Each door designed to take a hit (forklift, trucks, you name it) without damaging. With speeds up to 60 inches per second your area stays secured and climate controlled.

The D-Man recommends: For a superior product in the high speed industry choose Albany Doors, cover all your high speed needs! Doors include: UltraBig, UltraCool, UltraFast, UltraClean, UltraFreeze, UltraLight, UltraSecure, and UltraTough.

The D-Man’s Tips and Tactics: Helpful advice for making the most of this guide.
•    Keep safety of both customers and employees at the storefront when considering a glass door.
•    Consider the need for impact resistance and fire resistance.
•    Choose a commercial door based on how they can improve traffic flow, security, and energy costs.
•    With custom exterior commercial doors or storefronts, you can incorporate a logo or unique design.

When your garage door is actually in motion (typically no-more than 10-15 seconds) the motor take in is a current of 24DC and output is as small as 100 watts. 100 watts, WOW! Actually 100 watts is less than what it would take to run a laptop computer.

For the remainder of the time the garage door is on standby, where little to no power is being consumed. Most modern openers are equipped with energy-saving transformers ensuring that your carbon footprint is minimal.

When looking to make a purchase of an automatic garage door opener a common concern is maintenance. You will be delighted to know that little effort is required in optimal operation of you automatic opener.

The latest openers offered by the likes of LiftMaster are literally maintenance-free. Today’s automatic openers are equipped with so-called “self-adjusting technology” which will adjust the drive tension essentially eliminating the need for wasted time and costly service calls.
Garage door openers are constructed with precisely engineered and lightweight aluminium.  In combination with the self-adjusting technology, you can be assured that you garage door opener will require no maintenance but an exceptionally long life-span.
Replacing your old garage door system can completely change the appearance of your garage and bring undeniable benefits to your home. According to J-F Morin, Marketing director at Garaga (www.garaga.com), there are 10 valuable reasons to replacing your old garage door by a new one:

1.    Increase the value of your home
In fact, a better-looking garage door can increase the perceived value of the home by 1% to 4% (1). Investing in an upscale garage door is a very good return on your investment as many Real Estate agents will confirm that it is easier to sell your home when the garage looks great (2). Your will see, replacing an old garage door with a new stylish maintenance free door will do wonders for the value of your home.

2.    Improve the appearance of your home
Garage doors can take up between 30 to 40% of a home’s facade. How much is it worth to upgrade 30% of your front view of your house? Some garage doors come in as many as 15 colors in a baked-on paint finish, many different styles and a wide variety of windows, all of which can give your home a new look.

3.    Lower your heating and cooling bills with an R-16 garage door
A properly insulated garage door system can pay for itself over time by reducing your energy costs by keeping the heat out in the summer and the cold out in winter. This savings will occur when you have living quarters above the garage or when the garage is being used as a work shop. Your living area will feel more comfortable.

4.    Reduce your maintenance time
Many steel doors are low maintenance when you choose a pre-finished color. They require only mild soap and water for cleaning. So say goodbye to painting and scraping and hello to more leisure time. Go enjoy the outdoors!

5.    Protect items stored in your garage from weather conditions
Many people use their garage for storage. To protect those items from the damage caused by extreme heat and cold, choose an insulated door with a thermo barrier that prevents heat or cold from travelling from the outside surface to the inside surface. You can also combine this with a PVC weather-strip with screw cover and double fin rubber weather-strip.

6.    Increase the use of your garage
With the use of an insulated garage door between R-12 and R-18, you will find the garage a more pleasant place to work in. Your garage can be used as a workshop, art studio, playroom or a heated storage room.

7.    Increase the security of items stored in your garage
It’s much easier to kick in or drill through a wooden or steel non-insulated door then it is a 1 3/4 in. thick. A thicker door can be enough to deter a thief from trying to break through a steel insulated door.

8.    Prevent easy access to your home
The garage door is the largest access to your home. Many new garage door openers come with the rolling code technology, which makes it far more difficult to gain access when the opener uses one of 100 billion new codes each time the door is opened.

9.    Reduce the risk of injury
Photo eyes, which are now mandatory, sense when something is in the way or passing through the opening when the door is going down. This has two benefits, when the light beam is broken, the garage door will reverse back up when coming down to prevent an injury and/or turn on a light so you will see where you are going when it is dark.

You may find most flooring manufactures/retailers tend to give half truths. Sayings like “this floor is the best,” or “this product will never peal”.

The truth is the chemical makeup of the product will never fail. However, there are two main ingredients for creating that perfect floor. First and foremost is the preparation, in getting the concrete floor ready. Secondly is the top coat (polyurethane or polyurea-not epoxy). The importance is getting the flooring product to adhere to the substrate. Listed below by the D-Man is ways to approach this.

1.    Diamond Grind the floor, optimum finish grit is 150 or less. Again with adhesion being the most important part of your overall flooring product diamond grinding is the best technique.  The key to grinding is that the diamonds grind off any contaminates as well as break open the individual silica particles, leaving fresh, rough surfaces for the flooring material to mechanically bond onto.   Another reason diamond grinding is top of the list is because as you run the large diamond head across your floor it also does some smoothing out of any rough spots or high points.  In essence it is re-shaping your floor to a certain degree making it flatter and presumably a more desirable surface.

2.    Next up, Lead Shot Blast. This is a technique which takes thousands of tiny leads shot and will shoot it out at your floor at such a high velocity. This method is similar to washing your car with a pressure gun, however it shoots straight down and magnets trays re-collect the shot and funnel it into a hopper to be re-shot. There are some drawbacks to this method including, and “gunk’ will tend to be driven deep down into the pours and not completely removed. Secondly, old concrete may degrade at different rates and depths. This can cause the concrete to have slight variations in height. Although, these problems do exist it’s your safest bet next to Diamond Grinding.

3.    For the third pitch, use Acid Etch. Obvious problem when mentioning any acid is legal ramification. Certain state law prohibits products similar to these to be used so first check with your lawmakers. Even when qualified states permit use most of the time safety training is necessary. You will also need to understand the application entirely, if taken off to early you won’t get a good adhesion, flipside is if left on to long you will have breakdown of your substrate that will never be repairable. Overall, Acid Etch is more of an art than it is a science and is much cheaper but if done incorrectly can be very costly.

4.     Off the Shelf Cleaners - there are tons and tons of off the shelf degreasers and concrete cleaners out there that will help “clean” your concrete.  This for the most part is what a majority of the Do-It-Yourself floor applicators use but unfortunately your floor will not last the test of time with this method.  We grind up hundreds of floors that use this technique because you simply don’t give your concrete the proper profile in which the base coats can mechanically bond onto.  These are great for looks but don’t do enough to the concrete to properly prep it for a long term adhesion by hybrid polymer floor applications.