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Hettich Canada L.P. Montreal
120 Barr Street
Saint-Laurent, Quebec H4T 1Y4
If you hadn’t ever used the word ‘high-performance’ to describe what you need from a drawer we wouldn’t blame you. However, we can assure you that it is the most important point to consider when selecting drawers for your home.
When we talk about performance in a drawer, we are talking about how long at lasts and about how much stress you can put a drawer under and retain functionality.
Opening and closing function
There a number of technical elements that enable the opening and closing functionality, but the key thing is ease of access in conjunction with the design. The opening and closing function that you choose enables:
• Soft close, a slow closure at the end to ensure the drawer contents don’t move around. Hettich calls its soft close functionality ‘Silent system’
• Handleless drawer design, where you open the drawer by pressing on it causing it to pop open. Hettich refers to this as ‘Push to open’.
• Syncronised opening of extra wide handleless drawers, so if you push one side, the whole drawer opens evenly
• You can also have soft close and handleless drawer opening combined, which Hettich refers to as ‘Push to open Silent’.
Where handleless drawers are concerned, the higher quality the mechanism the better it is for little hands, elderly and anybody whose ease of handling is limited.
Weight bearing
Though this is a basic technical function typically left up to the kitchen installer, it is worth checking in on. If you are putting too heavy a load in a drawer not built for it, it is inevitable it will wear out earlier than expected.
AvanTech YOU offers 4 different weight bearing options; 10kg, 30kg, 40kg or 70kg.
Quality assurance
Hettich monitors its drawer quality through five specific tests:
• A corrosion test
• A wear test, ensuring a certain number of open and closures at maximum weight
• A retention-on-opening test, a rough opening a certain number of times
• A horizontal load test, testing the drawers capacity to take a knock from the side without permanent damage when opened all the way
• A vertical strain test, testing a drawers capacity to take a knock from above or below without permanent damage when opened all the way.
When selecting a high end drawer, you should be able to identify information on each of these points to make a clear comparison and identify the drawer that works for your space.
