Sliding Doors near you

People who fit a sliding door to a bedroom or a bathroom are frequently disappointed by how much they can hear through it, and then discover that the regulations offer no help at all. Approved Document E, which took effect on 1 July 2003, sets Requirement E2: dwelling-houses, flats and rooms for residential purposes shall be designed and constructed so that internal walls between a bedroom or a room containing a water closet, and other rooms, and internal floors, provide reasonable resistance to sound.

Then come the limits on application, and the first of them decides the matter. Requirement E2 does not apply to an internal wall which contains a door. It also does not apply to an internal wall separating an en suite toilet from the associated bedroom, or to existing walls and floors in a building subject to a material change of use. Where E2 does apply, Approved Document E's Table 0.2 sets a laboratory value for new internal walls within dwellings of 40 dB Rw minimum, airborne.

So the acoustic performance of a sliding door is entirely a matter of what you specify, and a sliding door is inherently worse than a hinged one because it cannot compress a seal all the way round. A hinged door pulls tight onto a stop; a slider runs past its frame with a gap at the head, a gap at the floor and a gap where it meets the jamb. Brush seals, a solid core leaf and a drop-down threshold seal all help, and none of them will make it a wall. If acoustic separation is the point, a hinged door in a properly built wall is the honest answer.

A pocket door needs a cavity roughly as wide as the door leaf, and everything currently inside that stretch of wall has to go somewhere else. Sockets and switches cannot sit on either face of the pocket, because there is no depth behind the plasterboard for a back box. Cables cannot cross it. Radiator pipes, waste pipes and soil stacks cannot pass through it. On a typical British stud wall this is the step that turns a simple-sounding job into a first-fix electrical and plumbing diversion.

Whether the wall is loadbearing decides everything else. A non-loadbearing stud partition can usually be opened up and reframed around a proprietary cassette. A loadbearing wall needs a new opening formed with proper support over it, and the structure of a building is not something to take on assumption — forming or enlarging an opening in a loadbearing wall is structural work that should be designed and signed off, not judged from underneath.

The cassette itself is worth choosing carefully because it is permanent. The frame is buried in the wall and re-skimmed over; replacing it later means opening the wall again. Ask what the frame is made of, what the leaf weight limit is, whether the gear is serviceable from outside the pocket once the plaster is on, and how the door is removed if a roller fails. A system that cannot be maintained without demolition is a poor bargain however good it looks on day one.

A glazed sliding door is a door, and Approved Document K's critical locations apply to it as they do to any other. Its requirement K4 is satisfied in one of four ways: glazing that breaks safely, glazing that is robust, glazing in small panes, or glazing permanently protected by a screen. Safe breakage is defined by reference to BS EN 12600 and BS 6206, where a breakage is safe if it creates a small clear opening only with detached particles no larger than the specified maximum size, disintegration with small detached particles, or broken glazing in separate pieces that are not sharp or pointed.

The classification then depends on where the pane is and how wide it is. Approved Document K treats a glazing material as suitable for a critical location if it satisfies Class 3 of BS EN 12600 or Class C of BS 6206, or, where it is installed in a door or a door side panel and has a pane width exceeding 900mm, Class 2 of BS EN 12600 or Class B of BS 6206. A wide single-pane sliding leaf is very often in that second category, which is a higher requirement than the one people assume.

There is a second, purely mechanical risk that the regulations do not address: the closing edge. A sliding leaf runs into a jamb or into a second leaf with a straight, unforgiving action and no hinge side to warn you, and finger injuries on bi-parting sliders and heavy barn doors are common. Soft-close gear on both ends of the travel, a deliberate gap or a finger-safe leading edge are cheap at the point of order and impossible to retrofit neatly.