Really nice and thought through insulated ladder
During the Eastern I mounted this as new access to the attic.
Apart from it being a great ladder, both strong, stable and with very high insulation (U=0.38 W / m²*K) once mounted, I was particularly impressed on how easy it was to mount!
Once I secured the bearing ‘hole’ in the right dimensions it was super easy to mount, single handed.
It is made by a Danish company, but here the link to the international page on the Dolle Clickfix Thermo Comfort.
During mounting I was repeatedly surprised on the amount of small details that was so well thought through!
I have rarely seen a product where there clearly has been considered how it shall be mounted in real life. I guess they have had a lot of feedback over the years, and used it effectively. 😎
The two most amazing details is what they call ClickFix, and the way the insulated trap door hinge is attached!
The ClickFix is a system where you just hang the ladder on the two mounts, and each side clicks in place and locks it. You can even press a release button on the top of each mount and lift it off again if you need to. The mounts comes prefixed to the frame, but here as spares so you can see how they look
To fasten the trap door, you just hang it on some pre-mounted screws, slide a metal rail with bajonet holes to the side, and fasten the screws. Now how easy and thought through is that!! The horisontal metal bar under the ClickFix mounts here:
The adjustment of the bearing arms and the mount of these to the ladder is also so thought through, with a spring blade popping in and locking it in place….
Everything is in the package, even screws to mount in the bearing frame/hole!
They got a detailed mounting instruction, like we are used to (from flat packed furnitures).
They even got a step by step 12min video. And they are not cutting corners here, it IS this easy!
And they even simplified the mount of the trap door slightly compared to this video!
I live in a 1880 house with low height to the ceiling, but they even thought of that! So when you cut off the lower step, they already made holes for mounting the screws holding the adjustable legs, one step up…
One tiny detail to notice if you want to do an ‘invisible mount, by placing the cut out ceiling on the trap door, is that the bottom of the trap door goes about 1 mm below the frame, so you have to lift the frame up by that when mounting, to get a flush finish.
And no, the oddities in the middle and the colour difference is not me being sloppy, that was how the boards was, that made up the old access.
The front line WAS me being sloppy… I actually did not plan to make it ‘invisible’, but then thought – hey why not….
I forgot to take a “before” image, but found an old image and cropped a dark corner. As you can see I reused the back and right edge of the hole.
(It was just a hole, and used a loose ladder, so HUGE improvement in the ease of access. 😀
Thermal
I did have some thermal before images though, here from February
And here some after ones (variable colour scale)
Tiny details.
Oddly the top of the metal tubes are open, so when anything falls in it will rattle, and can be cumbersome to get out, so I’ll recommend to close it somehow before even mounting.
I used this quick-and-dirty fix:
When reading the instruction it is a little unclear that the bearing arms for the ladder is also fixed through a bajonet hole, I took the liberty of drawing some rough dotted lines on a corner of the instruction, to indicate what is going on behind the locking spring (click to enlarge).
And recommended Dolle to find a more elegant solution. 😉
Actual mount
They suggest to make a 1200mm × 700mm fixed frame first, and I planned to do this:
Where the blue are the existing bearing beams.
The light brown the frame,
The deep red are 50 × 200 beams.
But to reuse the two edges of the hole I did it slightly different so the 700 got less.
- Laid out the long beam matching the edge of the hole with some slack, and secured it
- Then secured the other 1200mm away
- Placed the frame loose matching the edge of the hole
- Secured the two 1200mm long beams as snugly fits to the frame
- And then fixed the frame to the four beams, only needing spacers at the short edges