Window and Door Restrictors – How to Hold Your Timber Windows Open

All of our products will have standard factory-fitted options. But each project is different, and many customers ask for something quite specific due to child safety, ease-of-use or visual preferance. Below, we’ve outlined the main ideas that our customers choose to have.

Popular, Simple, Effective Ideas

Child-proof Restrictors

These should exist in many different forms, but the principle is always the same. Opening the window (or door) normally will only let it move around 10cm outwards. Opening the window further will require an intentionally-awkward process – normally pulling the window slightly closed and pushing a small catch out of the way.

Initially, you may find these to be slightly adult-proof too. So, obviously, care should be taken if adding these to a window that should realistically be used for a fire escape route.

Cabin Hooks

The easiest door restrictor idea that’s suitable for almost any situation and any product! You’ll have certainly come across these at some point in your life: attach the hook to wall (or anything else nearby) and attach the hole to the door. That’s it. They come in many lengths, styles and colours so, if a simple, effective fix is required – this will probably do the job perfectly adequately.

Magnetic Holders

Or glorified cabin hooks! These work on exactly the same principle, but suit more modern projects far better. Take more time than you think you should getting the two parts lined-up perfectly, and both halves of the magnetic should hold the door next to the wall in low-medium wind situations.

More Interesting Ideas

For something a little more exciting and outside the box, it’s best to ask the factory at the point of ordering the windows and doors themselves.

Sikringsbeslag

Unless you’ve lived in Denmark, you may not have ever seen these. This security restrictor can be attached at factory, or retrofitted. The design allows you to engage and disengage the restrictor easily and quickly inside, but makes it impossible to unhook from outside.

The notches on the steel rod can hold the window open at various points, but it can only extend as far as the curve at the end.

Being a Danish design, the main colours available are the traditional steel, brass and plain white.

Integrated Button Restrictor

Some window mechanisms, like our Unik Funkis fully reversible windows, have an integrated restrictor built into the mechanism itself. An incredibly simple solution of a button which must be pressed down to let the window open more than a dozen centimetres.

Basic Friction Restrictors

These started off as a very simple right-angle restrictor: open the door; it won’t open further than 90 degrees. But, since the restrictor rod slides along a groove as the door opens, a friction adjustment was added.

The idea is that you dial in a medium amount of friction that will act on the door constantly. It won’t stop the door from moving if you leave it open, but it will dampen the effect of any sudden breezes and, of course, the 90 degree limits stops it swinging all the way around and damaging itself on the building’s walls.

Handle-Operated Friction Brakes

These more-interactive restrictors are more common in windows, but can also be used is certain types of doors.

Take a basic friction restrictor, and attach the friction adjustment to the handle mechanism. This allows you to open the door with no friction, put the handle down at any point and it will be held in place with maximum friction.

It’s important to understand this type of restrictor shouldn’t be relied on in very strong winds (it is only holding the door through friction, not a solid fixing), but it’s more than capable in light-medium breezes.

More traditional: Stormkrog

Another very-Danish solution that’s worked perfectly well for decades. Think of it as a cabin hook, but used internally. Spaced out along the curved length of metal on the opening casement, the holes obviously hook onto the bracket screwed into the outer frame.

They’re incredibly simple and straightforward; it doesn’t necessarily have to be more complicated than that.

But, if all else fails…Katastrophebeslag

For the most part, these are not very good… They’re fiddly to install, don’t have a lot of flexibility and aren’t the nicest-feeling to use. However, they do fill a gap that does occasionally appear: if all the other options are unfeasible, these tiny, yet very solid restrictors can squeeze into places others can’t and create that extra safety aspect.

They also translate literally from Danish to “disaster brackets”, which describes them surprisingly well, and instantly puts them to the top of my wishlist…

Keyless Egress and Why We Recommend It for our Doors

Types of Window Lintels and Why You (obviously!) Need Them

Trickle Vents in Timber and Composite Windows

How to Measure Windows and Doors for a Quick Ballpark Quote