Jenny writes:
For some reason, almost all toddlers and young children, including mine go through a stage where opening and closing the door is the best and most clever trick in the world.
However, playing with doors can be very dangerous and a young child can very easily get their hand or finger trapped in the door and my five year old did exactly this earlier in the year. Jamm Door Stop was designed purely for this reason and is the innovative idea of Marc Ward who experienced having to watch his son in pain from trapping his fingers in a door.
The Jamm Door Stop is made in the United Kingdom and is also made from 85% recycled plastics as well as fully recyclable and minimalist packaging. Each of these features help to make you feel good about this product before even trying it out.
The Jamm Door stop is available in five different colours and are all BpA free. One of the best features of this product, over a normal door stop is that once it is in place, a child cannot push the door or pull it back. The door should be firmly in place in an open position. It also suggests that a child will be unable to remove the Jamm door stop themselves which is good.
When I first saw the Jamm Door Stop I was surprised that it was slightly bigger than I imagined and that it was made of rigid, hard plastic. For some reason I had imagined that it would be a softer rubber like plastic.
The instructions for this product are clear and include diagrams which help to make them even easier to follow. However, the instructions cannot be seen before unwrapping the product and this may confuse some people if they are considering buying the product.
I was a little concerned whether this product would work in my house as firstly my door width is thicker than in most houses. However, when I saw that the Jamm door stop has a curved design, I thought it would not be a problem. I was also concerned that this product would not work on either our laminate or ceramic tiled floors, although on the packaging it states that it is designed for all floor surfaces. My last concern was that because my house is older than some, I wondered if the Jamm door stop would not be able to work properly with the slightly wonky, large or narrow gaps under the doors. Again, I thought that with it’s wedge like shape, the Jamm door stop should be able to still work no matter the gap-size under the door and there were no specifications on the packaging to suggest that it wouldn’t.
However, we were unable to use this product on any of the doors in our house. Our kitchen has a tiled floor and the design on the tiles is not completely flat. The gap between the door and the tiles is also quite small. Unfortunately the Jamm door stop did not fit under.Our lounge is carpet floored. However, when we pushed the Jamm door stop under the door, the door stop seemed to push down on the carpet rather than actually wedge the door. We do have underlay under the carpet but are surprised that this stopped the product from working as good as it should. The door was held in place, however it was not firm and my toddler was still able to move the door backwards and forwards with the door stop in place. Admittedly, it would have been impossible for him to trap his fingers in the door from doing this but still not very practical and not what I expected.
Our dining room has laminate flooring. After using what we thought was adequate force to install the Jamm door stop into position, we found that it slid around under the door and didn’t do the job that we thought it would. We did think about pushing the door stop under even further and harder but were concerned that the hard plastic of the door stop would mark or damage our flooring if we used too much force. Unfortunately we could not use the Jamm Door stop on our upstairs doors either as the gaps between the floor and door were too large for the door stop to work.I also noticed that with the pushing and shoving of the Jamm door stop under our doors, the door stop rubbed some of the very bottom paint work from the doors and transferred the white paint obviously on to the grey plastic of the door stop.
It is a shame that I was not able to use this product and that there are not more specifications on the packaging about where and how the Jamm door stop works as the online reviews for this product suggest that it is a very good and useful product and I feel we could have found the Jamm door stop useful.
The JAMM Door Stop is available from Hippychick for £4.95
