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The Critical Role that Hinges Play on your Cooler and Freezer Doors

The Critical Role that Hinges Play on your Cooler and Freezer Doors

Back when Mountain men built their cabins they would build a door then attach leather straps to the door as hinges, they served their purpose the door opened and the door closed. What I’m saying is anything can be used for a hinge and while we have come a long way from the inventions of Daniel Boone and Davy Crocket we still can improve our hinge.

Today perhaps we don’t think too much about “Hinges” we walk through countless doors every day and the door opens and closes swinging on hinges of one kind or another. Life goes on without much thought.

But on a freezer or cooler door the hinge becomes a bit more important for two reasons.

The doors weight and maintaining a good seal is imperative to the doors operation. While some door manufactures have good seals and strong hinges to support the door they don’t always work together in harmony. 

So imagine a door that not only considers the weight of the door and adjusts its placement of hinges accordingly, but also takes into account the seal. Not only does the door seal well but the seal lasts. And to top it all off you can adjust the door up and down at the hinge with the turn of a wrench.

EMS has made this a reality with the development of their hinges. The first part of the hinge that should be addressed is its material. As with all EMS doors the hardware is stainless steel and our hinges are no exception whether on our commercial doors or freezer doors stainless steel is a standard.

Does the placement of the hinge matter? It depends on the weight and size of the door; this dictates our number and placement of hinges.

For instance our Freezer door (the GTM 1) can be used in blast freezer rooms reaching -40 degrees. The thickness of the door ranges between 4.72”- 6.30” depending on application and temperature difference. At EMS we design the door for the application not a one size fits all, thus the range in door thickness.  Now our door is light in comparison to many manufactures, we use 10# polyurethane foam (read news letter article Why EMS-USA Uses a 10# Polyurethane Foam) which strengthens the door and eliminates the need for an internal frame and absolutely no wood in or around the door.

OK, that’s interesting. Why? Well, let’s think about it. Our engineers did.Where is most of the weight of the door - the bottom, middle, or top of the door? If you said top of the door you're right. So that is where the added support should be too right? So when you look at an EMS door you will see the third hinge 2” below the top hinge. We’re not trying to be different we’re trying to engineer our door so it works and lasts for our customers. You could have a gold plated door but if it falls off its hinges or begins to tilt what good is it?

Now, what about the seal? We have great seals all the way around the door. But again what good are they if they don’t last and they wear off.  This is a common problem with most doors, the bottom seal wears out as door opens and closes. OK, so they have a threshold for the door it keeps the door up and off the ground and thus the seal only touches when the door closes? What about the employee with the cart back in forth over the threshold bump, bump or the wash down when the threshold makes a dam? 

EMS doors eliminate the threshold and the seal wear issue with “rising hinges” that come up as the door swings open lifting the door ¼ ” up and out of the way. In fact our full line of doors has this feature of rising hinges.  However, only our freezer and cooler doors have rising hinges that have a three-dimensional adjust-ability.

EMS has taken all things into consideration with the development of our swing door line. We have really only touched on one of the aspects of our door and one that most may think is inconsequential: the hinges. It’s really the attention to detail that make EMS-USA an industry leader, so check out our whole line at http://www.ems-usa.us.