Gates on your drive

Your drive, at your opening width

Photograph the opening, drop it in, and try gates on it. Single or a pair, four styles, any colour, dragged and scaled until it looks like the thing you are picturing.

Gate showrooms and websites show you a gate on a gravel drive between two stone piers in Cotswold sunshine. Useful for seeing the ironwork, useless for deciding whether it suits a 1930s semi with a dropped kerb and a wheelie bin. That decision needs your photo.

One leaf or two, and why it is nearly always two

A single leaf across a 3m opening is a bad gate, and the reason is leverage rather than looks.

All the weight hangs off one post, 3m from where it acts, so the hinge post has to be substantial and properly set. It also swings through a 3m arc, which on most drives means it hits a car, a wall or a bin. Two leaves halve the weight on each post and halve the arc. A single leaf is right for a pedestrian gate up to about 1.2m and awkward beyond it.

Tick the pair option and the tool splits the opening into two leaves and leaves the meeting gap between them.

The clearances, which is where drawings usually lie

A gate is always narrower than its opening, and this tool draws that in rather than pretending otherwise.

• About 10mm at each hinge. Without it the leaf binds on the post as soon as anything moves or swells.
• About 20mm where a pair meets. Two leaves that touch in the middle will catch on each other on the first cold morning.
• Clearance underneath. Drives fall away for drainage, so a gate that clears the ground at the hinge can foul it at the far end. Worth measuring at both ends before ordering anything.

So a 3,000mm opening gives a pair of leaves at roughly 1,485mm each, not 1,500. That 15mm is the difference between a gate that shuts and a gate that gets planed on site.

See through it or not

Bars keep the frontage open and make a small drive look bigger. Close boarding gives you privacy and catches the wind.

The wind matters more than people expect. A solid pair of gates 3m wide and 1.5m tall is four and a half square metres of sail, and everything it catches goes into the hinges, the posts and the concrete around them. It is the commonest reason a set of gates ends up leaning. If the drive is exposed, bars or a boarded gate with a gap at the top will outlast a solid one.

Height, and the bit by the road

Gates adjoining a highway are restricted in height under permitted development, and the limit is lower than most people assume.

It is also the one part of this that is worth a phone call rather than a search, because conservation areas, listed buildings and any Article 4 direction change the answer, and so does whether the gate opens outwards over a footpath. None of that is a reason not to try the look first, which is what this tool is for.

What goes in the ground is not on this page

What the posts need to be, or what goes in the ground. Both depend on the leaf weight, the exposure and what you are digging into.

Automation changes it again: a motor puts continuous load into a post that a hand-swung gate never does, and it brings safety requirements with it, including force limits and edge protection. That is a conversation with an installer, not a number this tool can give you.