IS YOUR GARAGE DOOR IMPACT RATED?
Many of our Florida garage door customers are looking to get discounts on their homeowner’s insurance. One way of doing this is to have impact rated windows and doors, including your garage door. We receive calls every week from customers wanting to know how to determine if their garage door is impact rated. To start, you want to look at your garage door and search for a wind load sticker. This sticker will usually have the manufacturers name, model number and design pressures listed. Some stickers will tell you immediately that the garage door is impact rated. Others are vaguer. For example, this picture of the Clopay wind code sticker has the pressures of +38/-42 but it doesn’t tell you what model or whether the garage door is impact rated. In this case, you can utilize the Florida Product Approval Website to search for that door.
Go to http://www.floridabuilding.org/pr/pr_app_srch.aspx and enter in the manufacturers name under Product Manufacturer and under Category select exterior doors. Under Subcategory select Sectional exterior door assemblies. Towards the bottom of the search window you will see the option to search for impact resistant products. Select yes and then run the search. The next window will appear is titled Search Results – Applications. It looks like this…(see Exhibit A)
*You may need to add that they select the 2007 or 2004 building code depending on how old their door is on the Florida Product approval site. It now defaults to the new 2010 code.
This shows the FL Numbers for this manufacturer in the left-hand column with what products numbers are impact resistant. You will then have to click on each FL number and then it brings up a new screen that shows the product approval numbers in the left-hand column and the drawing number appears in the right-hand column under the heading installation instructions. It will have the FL number listed first and then the drawing number. (See Exhibit B)
Continue to search all pages until you see the number, which in this case it is 101348. It is located on page 5. You will see the number listed two times. Once as an A and then as a B. The A is impact resistant which means the door has no glass or impact rated glass. If you have regular glass, it is a B and is not impact rated.
If you have a sticker, which says DAB Door Company that has Miami-Dade NOA’s on it, you are as good as gold. All Miami-Dade NOA’s are impact rated. Some manufacturers like Windsor do not have any impact rated doors. So if you see the Windsor sticker you know it is not impact rated. At that point, you may want to consider visiting one of our garage door showrooms to see what options are available for you for a replacement wind and impact rated garage door.
