Commercial Door Stops

A door stop's job is to protect doors and walls. Let’s look at the door stops in the common areas of a multi-family property, also known as commercial door stops:

Wall Stop

The most used doorstop in common areas or in most commercial structures is the wall stop. The wall stop is located on the wall at the point where the lockset would bump into the wall. The wall stop prevents the door from damaging the adjacent wall. It cushions the contact as the door is swung open wide.

A wall stop can be either concave or convex. The best practice is to use a convex wall stop whenever possible unless the lockset has a push button. When the lockset has a push button, a concave wall stop is a better solution. A concave wall stop is used to prevent the push button from being accidentally activated when opening the door.

Floor Stop

There are a variety of situations where a wall stop will not work. One of the alternate solutions could be to use a floor stop. Floor stops are used when no wall is present for the door to swing against. A floor stop’s purpose is to prevent the door from swinging into equipment, shelves, or furniture causing damage to the door or to the items nearby. When considering using a floor stop, it is important to give thought to the floor stop becoming a tripping hazard. If there is a chance of this happening, a floor stop should not be used.

Overhead Stop

An alternate solution to a floor stop is an overhead stop. An overhead stop performs the same function as a floor stop by preventing the door from swinging too far open and bumping into nearby equipment. Rather than being mounted on the floor, it is mounted at the top of the door and attached to the head of the frame. An overhead stop can be either surface applied or concealed. It is important to recognize that overhead stops may create hardware conflicts. Often when following the standards for where to mount hardware, the overhead stop and the door closer can conflict with one another. This means each piece of hardware wants to occupy the same space on the door and the frame thus not allowing either one to function properly. If a conflict exists, there are ways to overcome it. One solution is to use a special template for the door closer arm to create additional space for the overhead stop.

Another solution is to incorporate the overhead stop into the arm of the door closer. This type of doorstop is called a closer stop arm. A closer stop arm may be used when the closer is mounted in a parallel position. A closer stop arm is a special group of closer arms that have an integral stop forged into the closer arm. By incorporating the overhead stop into the closer arm, the conflict is eliminated. The closer stop arm allows a door to open between 85 and 110 degrees depending on where the closer is located (distance from the edge of the door).

Kick-Down Stop

There are a few other types of doorstops that are seldom called out: a kick-down stop, is one of them. A kick-down doorstop is mounted on the push side of the door near the lower leading edge of a door. It is intended to be used to hold a door in the open position at select times and then folded up when not needed. While they offer a solution to holding a door open, using kick-down stops at fire-rated openings conflicts with the fire codes. Avoid making this mistake.

Roller Stop

A roller stop is also rarely called out. It's used when two doors could open against each other. It is mounted at the top leading edge of one of the doors preventing the locksets from striking each other.

If you're looking for residential door stops, check out our guide.

See How to Design a Hardware Set to learn more.