Thread by @gengelstein

This is horrifying.

I have personal experience with safety on doors. Since the early 1990’s I have been involved with the UL safety committee on garage door openers.

a thread with a bit of history 🧵

https://twitter.com/50TurnParty/status/1788217127327175104

In the 1980’s about 50 children in the United States were killed by automatic garage door openers, typically by getting trapped beneath as the motor continued to try to close the door completely. 20,000 – 30,000 people were injured by garage door openers per year.

In 1993 the industry worked with UL to introduce new safety standards requiring non-contact sensors, like the infrared beams you probably have at the base of your garage door, as well as current sensors for the motor, so if there’s a spike in current it reverses.

There’s also typically a timeout that if for any reason the door hasn’t reached an endpoint by a certain time it reverses.

I’m a member of that UL safety committee.

These and other safety measures have dramatically reduced the number of injuries from garage doors. Remember that 20 – 30,000 injury per year statistic? In 2022 there were 34.

Even over the last five years the UL safety team I am on has continued to add improvements (yes, “regulations” for those of you that think that’s a dirty word), and the injury rate has fallen about 13% per year over the last five years.

That an engineering team would decide that when an automatically closing door hits an obstacle that it would KEEP TRYING WITH EVEN MORE FORCE is absolutely mind-boggling to me.

The right thing to do – as both common sense and actual field data easily show – is to reverse to release the pressure, give some type of indicator that there is a blockage or problem, and wait for a human to deal with it.

In cases where you really need the door to close and there is some issue, for garage doors we allow “constant pressure” on a button – meaning that a human needs to hold the button down continuously while the door is in motion, to make sure no one is getting hurt.

And the button needs to be located where the person pushing it can see the door closing (so you can’t do it from an app, for example).

I’m sorry this is so long. But having spent decades working to prevent children from dying, this really upsets me personally. I know that for some of you the idea of regulations like UL325 forcing manufacturers to meet safety standards goes against your libertarian ideals.

But I’ve seen first-hand how life-saving they can be.

And also I know that many of you think that companies only have nefarious motives – and sometimes they do. But I know that the garage door safety committee is staffed with people employed by manufacturers who are all committed to continuously making products safer.

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