Pressure mounted baby gates are a popular choice for keeping your small children and pets out of harm's way. Featuring padded bolts that screw or slide out to brace against door frames, stair posts and walls, they cordon off rooms and stairways unsuitable for infants and toddlers. The frames of these products also feature an inner hinge that allows adults to walk through the gates by squeezing, pressing or stepping on a childproof release latch. Although these do have protective coverings over the points that come in contact with the wall, care must still be taken when using them. Noting the settings when first using them can make it much easier to put the gate into place later.
Among the range of baby gates, pressure mounted baby gates fall somewhere in the middle of the security spectrum. They offer superior protection to retractable baby gates, which use mesh screens, instead of the aluminum, plastic or wood used by hardware mounted and pressure mounted models.
For most placements in the home, retractable and pressure mount baby gates are sufficient, since their primary purpose is to discourage entry rather than provide an impenetrable barricade. The one application where both types fall short is top-of-stairs placement. Both are sometimes positioned by their manufacturers as being acceptable as top-of-stairs baby gates, but in truth, only hardware mounted baby gates are reassuringly suited for this purpose. If you are looking for a gate to put at the top of the stairs MAKE SURE that it is designed for just that purpose.
A child who falls through a polyester mesh screen or a pressure mounted gate that slips out of place rarely has severe consequences, as long as the fall takes place on a bottom stair landing or a from a hallway into a bedroom entrance. If the same fall were to happen from the top of a stairs, much more serious injuries could ensue. Hardware mounted gates have external brackets that are screwed in to newel posts and door frames, so slippage is not an issue. They are not necessarily made for convenience. They are meant to keep children out of harm's way.
As long as pressure mounted gates are used on level floors or the bottom of stairs, they're often a better choice than hardware mounted ones. Pressure mounted gates won't blemish your stair posts or walls with screw holes. Better still, most brands install in minutes without tools, and can be dismounted and reinstalled wherever you choose — even in a friend's house for temporary usage.
So if you specifically need a stair gate, only consider a hardware mounted model. If ease of installation and portability are your main criteria, pressure mounted baby gates may be the best option.
Depending on the gate you choose, use care as you set it up for the first time. Forcing the pressure mounted gate into place at a setting that is too tight can result in damage to walls. It is not difficult to figure out the proper setting that will keep the gate in place without doing damage, but you do have to be careful at first. Also, if you are using the gate to pen a puppy or larger dog in one particular room, be sure that the gate does not have openings that the dog can catch its claws on and get stuck. I do not think that this is as much of a concern with more modern designs, but older gates (like you might find at a garage sale) often are made of a crossing pattern of heavy gauge wire-like material. A dog that gets stuck on one of these might be prone to panic and try to pull away resulting in a not so pleasant situation. You may want to avoid these older used gates for just this reason. Here is a link to some of the Pressure Mounted Baby Gates
