Automatic doors fail with a peculiar kind of amnesia. The sensor that watched a hundred people pass through it flawlessly this morning will, without warning or apparent cause, simply stop registering the hundred and first.
The door has no memory of its own good behavior and no explanation for its lapse. It just stands there, motor idling, waiting for someone to notice it has quietly stopped doing its job.
This is rarely the dramatic failure people imagine. It is a small, undramatic drift, and diagnosing it correctly is most of what separates a five minute fix from a Monday morning spent propping a door open with a trash can. Cypress Door and Glass handles both commercial automatic door installation and the ongoing service that keeps a system from developing this kind of amnesia in the first place.
The 2017 Rule Nobody Retrofitted
ANSI/BHMA A156.10 was revised in 2017 to require monitored presence sensors on power operated pedestrian doors, meaning the door itself now has to be capable of noticing when its own sensor has failed, rather than swinging open blindly on faith. Any new installation has to meet that standard. The overwhelming majority of doors installed before 2017 do not, and nobody is required to retrofit them unless local code says otherwise or a renovation triggers the requirement.
That gap matters more than most property owners realize. A pre-2017 door can fail its own safety monitoring silently, continuing to operate for weeks with a sensor that has quietly stopped seeing anything at all, simply because nothing in the system is built to flag its own blindness.
Norfolk’s Case for Redundancy
Hampton Roads carries enough federal and military-adjacent commercial traffic that automatic entrances there tend to run harder cycle counts than almost anywhere else in the region, and the properties that take service seriously tend to be the ones with contracts or clearances riding on reliable, monitored access. A door that quietly fails its own sensor test is a different category of problem for a facility with security obligations than it is for a retail boutique, even though the underlying hardware fault looks identical on a service ticket.
Orlando presents the opposite case for the same conclusion: not security stakes, but sheer volume. Automatic entrances at hospitality and retail properties near the tourism corridor cycle at a rate that would prematurely age a residential-grade operator within a single season, which is why commercial grading exists as a category in the first place.
Low Energy or Full Power
Low energy doors require a deliberate act: a button press, a wave at a plate. Full power doors open the instant a sensor detects approach, no invitation required.
A quiet DC office lobby usually suits low energy fine. A high traffic entrance anywhere near a tourism or retail corridor generally needs full power just to keep pace with the volume moving through it.
What Service Actually Buys
| Check | What It Catches |
| Sensor calibration | Drifted detection zones, the most common cause of a door that seems to ignore people |
| Closing force test | A door swinging too fast or too slow against standard tolerances |
| Control board review | Early signs of a failing board before it strands the door mid cycle |
| Signage and monitoring check | Confirms the door can still detect its own sensor failure |
When a Repair Stops Being a Repair
A single sensor fault after a storm is unremarkable. A door needing its control board reset every few weeks is a different animal entirely, one usually pointing to a failing power supply or a board genuinely near the end of its service life rather than anything a recalibration will fix twice.
At that point, a fresh commercial automatic door installation built to the current monitored standard from day one tends to cost less across several years than continuing to nurse an aging system through the same failure on a loop. Most people searching for emergency help at that stage are not weighing standards documents. They have a door that will not open, and a commercial automatic door service visit that actually diagnoses the pattern, rather than simply resetting it again, is the difference between solving the problem and scheduling the next visit.
The Amnesia Doesn’t Cure Itself
Left alone, a drifting sensor doesn’t recalibrate on its own, the way a person might eventually notice they’ve been squinting and get their eyes checked. It simply keeps missing a slightly wider margin of people each month, quietly, until the pattern becomes obvious enough that someone finally calls.
Routine service exists precisely to interrupt that quiet drift before it becomes a Monday morning problem, which is a considerably cheaper habit than waiting for the door to announce its own failure on the worst possible day.
Frequently Asked Questions
How often should a commercial automatic door be serviced?
An annual inspection is standard, though entrances with heavy daily traffic, such as retail or hospitality properties, often benefit from a check every six months instead.
What changed with the 2017 automatic door safety standard?
ANSI/BHMA A156.10 began requiring monitored presence sensors that can detect and flag their own failure, rather than continuing to operate blindly if a sensor stops working.
Do older automatic doors need to be retrofitted to meet the new standard?
Not automatically. Retrofitting is generally required only if local code specifies it or a renovation triggers the requirement, so many pre-2017 doors are still running the older standard.
What’s the real difference between low energy and full power doors?
Low energy doors open on a deliberate act, like a button press. Full power doors open automatically once a sensor detects someone approaching, which suits higher traffic entrances better.
Is emergency automatic door repair available?
Yes. A stuck or malfunctioning automatic door affects both access and basic security, so it’s treated as an urgent call.
Keep the Amnesia From Setting In
An automatic door with early amnesia is far easier to treat than one that has already stopped working. If yours has started hesitating, or it is simply due for its annual check, Cypress Door and Glass would be glad to take a look and keep it running the way it should.