The Importance of correctly installed and maintained Fire Doors
A Fire Door is just a door, right? Wrong! A Fire Door is an engineered safety device. A lot of premise owners overlook the importance of a Fire Door as to them, and to most people it is ‘just a door’. However people don’t understand the specificity that needs to go into a Fire Door in order to make it fit for purpose in a crucial time. There should be no room for error as a Fire Door only has one job- to delay the passage of fire and smoke for enough time for a building to be evacuated. If a Fire Door is not maintained and becomes damaged, or even if it is not correctly installed in the first instance, there can be no guarantee it will work as a Fire Door. Fire Doors usually range from 30 minutes, 60 minutes to 120 minutes, yet if the integrity of the door is compromised, it may not prevent to passage of smoke or fire for even 5 minutes.
The smallest details can affect a Fire Door from working as it should, for example; incorrect door gaps, Poorly fitted intumescent seals/ smoke seals, voids in the door leaf itself, or the door frame failing to be properly Fire Stopped. If there are incorrect gaps, the intumescent strips (the seals in the door/ frame that expand on heat) will not be able to secure the door correctly, leading to fire and smoke leaking through. If there are voids in the door leaf, for example from hardware that has been removed (locks, door closers, signs) this can compromise the integrity of the door leaf.
Depending on the use of a building this should depend on how often the Fire Doors should be checked. If a building has a high footfall such as a hospital/ residential environment the doors may need to be checked much more frequently as they may come in to contact with hospital beds, trollies, or other heavy objects that may damage the frame or the door leaf. At Yorkshire Fire Solutions we deem it necessary to maintain your Fire Doors every 6 months at a minimum to ensure that if needed, repairs can be carried out as soon as possible.
At Yorkshire Fire Solutions we can supply you with a compartmentation plan, which will determine which doors should be Fire Doors, therefore which doors would need to be maintained. We can then carry out a survey on each door, to see if the Fire Door is compliant e.g correct gaps, intumescent seals, smoke seals, fire rated hinges, no damage to door leaf/ frame. After the survey is carried out we can then determine which doors would need to be replaced or which could be repaired.
You can do a quick 5 step check on your doors which can be found on the Fire Door Safety Week Website: http://firedoorsafetyweek.co.uk/new-interactive-fire-door-5-step-check/?article=true
