Safety Edges To Prevent Harmful Incidents With Gate Systems

Safety edges have become increasingly popular with gate installers in recent years and with good reason. A safety edge provides a simple and effective method of protecting a specific part of the gate from causing a sheering, crushing or trapping incident. This greatly increases the likelihood of a gate passing a force test, but there is one more reason why safety edges have become so popular. They will not falsely trigger.

Click on the links below to find out more information on the different types of safety edges available.

Safety Edge Accessories

Let’s compare a gate system that uses just current sensing with a gate that uses just safety edges. The gate with current sensing is sensitive across the whole of the gate; however, it is much more sensitive at the leading edge and much less sensitive at the hinge. This means that a large gate leaf will pick up more false positives due to wind or other site conditions. Current sensing systems must also switch off the current sensing when they get close to their physical stop position. This is to prevent the current sensing system detecting the physical stop as an obstruction and is usually referred to as tolerance. These 2 factors (site conditions and tolerance) can make a current sensing system very hard to set up perfectly.

A purely safety edge system will never suffer from a false positive but it can only detect an obstruction where the edge is fitted. This can lead to lots of edges being used on a gate, increasing the systems cost. Usually, 2 or more safety systems are used together to provide the safest possible gate for a reasonable cost.