Panic Bars and Exit Devices in Broward County

What goes wrong with panic bars and why

Exit hardware exists for one reason: anyone inside must be able to get out immediately, without a key, without thinking, in the dark, under pressure. Everything else about the door is secondary to that. It is also the piece of hardware most likely to be quietly broken, because a bar that has become stiff still technically opens, so nobody reports it.

The most common faults we find are not dramatic. Latches drift out of alignment as the door and frame move, mounting screws loosen from thousands of cycles, and the dogging mechanism that holds a bar retracted during business hours wears out. Most of it is adjustment and worn parts rather than replacement, which is a much smaller job than people expect when they call.

Rear and service doors are where problems hide. They get used constantly by staff, they rarely get looked at by anyone, and in coastal Broward they take weather that front entrances are sheltered from. If you have a back door with an exit device on it that nobody has checked in a couple of years, that is the one worth looking at.

We are locksmiths, not your fire inspector, and we will not pretend otherwise. What we will do is install and maintain exit hardware properly, tell you plainly if something on your door is not working the way it should, and get it operating correctly. If a compliance question is genuinely a question, we will say that too rather than guess.