What mesh is each security door actually made of?

Every security screen vendor says stainless steel. Almost none of them put the two numbers that matter next to each other, and the ones that do publish them in units the others do not use. This page collects what each company publishes about its own mesh, in both millimeters and inches, with the source and date attached to every row.

The published specs, side by side

Every figure below comes from the manufacturer's own published material on the date given. Where a company does not publish something, the cell says so rather than guessing, and that includes the system we sell.

Why nobody could compare these before

The security screen trade grew up in Australia, so its specifications are written in millimeters and tested against Australian standards. The American retail market quotes wire in thousandths of an inch. Both conventions are perfectly reasonable and neither side converts, which leaves a homeowner holding two quotes that appear to describe different products when they may not.

The arithmetic is not complicated, and it is worth doing once. A millimeter is 0.03937 of an inch. So 0.8 mm is 0.0315 of an inch, 0.9 mm is 0.0354 of an inch, and a wire published as 0.035 of an inch is 0.889 mm, which rounds to the same 0.9 mm another company prints. Anyone comparing a 0.9 mm quote against a 0.035 inch quote is comparing two descriptions of one wire.

One more piece of published arithmetic worth checking rather than accepting. Crimsafe states that its 0.9 mm wire is up to 26.5 percent thicker than competitor screens. Read as cross-sectional area against a 0.8 mm wire that is exactly right: squaring the ratio of the diameters gives 26.6 percent more steel in section. It is a fair claim, correctly stated, and it is an area comparison rather than a diameter one. The diameters themselves differ by 12.5 percent.

What none of them publish

Reading four manufacturers' specifications end to end, the gaps are as informative as the figures. Not one of the four publishes a tensile figure for its mesh, so the number that would let an engineer model the fabric properly is unavailable across the whole category. Weave count is published by exactly one of them: Boss states a 12 by 12 weave, as of July 2026, and the other three do not give a count at all. Alloy grade and wire diameter are the two figures the market has broadly agreed to disclose, and even there one of the four does not disclose both.

That includes us, and we would rather say it here than have you notice it later. Vista publishes its alloy as 316 marine grade and publishes the knife-shear standard the mesh is tested to, but it does not publish a wire diameter, so we cannot give you one. We will not print a number Vista has not published in order to fill a cell in our own table. If that figure is published later, this page gets updated with the date attached, the same as every other row.

What the alloy number actually decides

304 and 316 are both chromium-nickel stainless steels, and when new, in a showroom, under the same powder coat, they are difficult to tell apart. The difference is that 316 adds roughly 2 to 3 percent molybdenum, which resists chloride corrosion, the specific chemistry of sea salt. That is the entire reason 316 is called marine grade and the reason boat fittings use it. Inland, 304 serves honorably for decades. Within reach of the Orange County marine layer, the fog does the specifying for you. The grade-by-grade version of this argument, including what happens to each alloy in year ten, is in our mesh grades guide.

Wire diameter is a different axis and a genuinely useful one: more steel in section absorbs more impact energy. The trap is treating either number as the whole answer. A security screen stops force as a system, and the mesh is one of four parts, along with how the mesh is clamped into the frame, the rigidity of the frame itself, and whether the lock throws into solid structure rather than into trim. A superb mesh in a soft frame fails at the frame, which is why a spec sheet is where a comparison starts rather than where it finishes.

How to use this when you are actually buying

Ask for two things in writing on the quote: the alloy grade as a number, and the wire diameter with its unit. Not marine grade, which is a phrase; 316, which is a specification you can look up. Any vendor selling 316 will write it down gladly, because it costs more than 304 and it is the reason their price is what it is. A vendor who will only say stainless steel has answered a different question than the one you asked.

For our part, every Daylight Steel product uses woven 316 marine-grade stainless mesh with no lower-grade tier in the line, and the alloy is named on the written quote before you decide anything. Our installed pricing is published rather than quoted at the kitchen table: hinged doors are $2,475 installed, and the full table sits on our pricing page. If you would rather see how we compare with a specific brand line by line, we keep an honest page for each of Crimsafe, Titan and Boss, each one built the same way this table was, from their published material with the date attached.