As specialists in our field, Fire Door Experts are constantly pushing for a raising of standards to provide better passive fire protection with regards to fire door installation and maintenance.

It still amazes us that there is still no real regulation around fire door installation!

Something that recently piqued the interest of Si West, Fire Door Experts Managing Director, was a technical document published by Richard Smith at NHBC. One section in particular highlighted the common practice fire doors being installed and offered for inspection at the pre-plaster stage of building works.

Why should that create such interest?

Fire doors need to be installed with exacting 2-4mm tolerances; as timber doors are made from natural species, any additional moisture added to the building’s atmosphere will see these natural material products change shape and size.

Add to this the fact that fire doors are widely installed by non-3rd party accredited installers in new builds, and the accuracy of installation reduces further.

Fire door leaf manufacturers are voicing concerns about their doors being installed in such conditions and whether the product warranty remains valid as stored and installed outside the recommended parameters, but more importantly, whether their passive fire protection properties remain!

These thoughts, and others gathered from reading various blogs and forums, triggered a letter from Si to Richard. Our common sense solution put forward..?

Why not just make it mandatory that ALL fire doors in ALL buildings MUST be installed and signed off by 3rd party accredited fire door installers?

Whether Si’s letter played a part or not, we can’t be sure, but it was very pleasing to read NHBC announce a U-turn on this subject shortly after the letter was sent.

Amended guidance was published in a new technical update which now offers three options for installers and contractors to help maintain the protection offered by fire door-sets and testing for integrity:

Option 1

Fire door frames installed at pre-plaster stage is still a valid option

Option 2

Fire door linings installed at pre-plaster stage to allow the fitting of the frame at a later stage.

Option 3

Fire door frames installed after pre-plaster with architraves not fitted until satisfactory inspection to ensure the linear gap is correctly fire stopped.

The NHBC is also conducting trials to assess the viability of 3rd-party accredited installers, which is a move that has been welcomed by fire door manufacturers who have cited the news as “definitely a win for safety”.

Consultation with all parts of the industry is vital is essential to ensure that installation quality and product safety is further improved. We’d like to think we’ve played a small part in this step forward, and will continue to lobby for all fire door installations and maintenance to be carried out by 3rd-party accredited, and therefore suitably trained and qualified, contractors.

Click below to read Si’s full letter.

Watch how quickly fire can engulf a room!

As a building owner, landlord or Responsible Person, you have a statutory obligation to ensure your fire doors are compliant and fit for purpose.

So, you instruct a third party accredited fire door contractor to inspect and assess your fire doors. You (should) then receive a detailed report and cost estimate. Naturally, you want to get comparison quotes, so you send the report out to other contractors to price up.

The following things then probably happen:

1 Other contractors refuse to provide costs for repairs based on someone else’s report.

2 Another fire door contractor will price up the report, but include many clauses to cover them for pricing off someone else’s report. This includes disagreeing with some elements of the report and / or not costing certain elements at all.

3 A lot of time elapses between from when the first report was commissioned and completed, to when you finally have (at least) 2 costings to ‘compare’.

4 Now you have at least 2 costs back, you can’t actually compare like for like as each contractor’s prices have different interpretations of the reports and what they have (and have not) allowed for. So, in effect, you can’t actually compare like for like.

5 Several months have since elapsed into this project, and you have not progressed any further as all you have managed to do is pay for a fire door survey which you have vastly different costs back for any remedial works, all with different views on what is permitted to be carried out to maintain an existing fire door assembly back to its originally intended fire rating.

If this has happened to you, this is where we can help!

Our Planned Preventative Maintenance Proposal for fire door maintenance works can filter out all this lost time and money with the traditional route of fire door surveys. With our PPM, we have different levels of service agreement to maintain your existing fire door assemblies back to their originally intended fire rating with BM Trada Certification, whilst we survey them!

This not only saves you the cost, lost time and headache of conflicting fire door survey reports and costs, it also ensures you are fulfilling your statutory obligations to maintain your fire doors.

Please get in touch for further information.

BM Trada Q-Mark Certificate 001 – we really were 1st!

Whilst recently rearranging the office, we realised what we had in our possession – the very first BM Trada Q-Mark certificate for door installation!

As well as being No. 001, we’re also very proud to be BM Trada Q-Mark certified. Here at Fire Door Experts, we firmly believe the detail required through Trada’s fire door inspection and maintenance schemes leave no stone unturned, and leaves a building’s Responsible Person in no doubt that the fire door assemblies will provide effective passive fire protection.

A prime example being a ‘fire door’ with no intumescent strips present can’t have been a factory tested fire door under the Q-Mark scheme, otherwise it would have the strips installed – which makes perfect sense when you think about it. Other schemes would allow the door leaves to have the edges routed and intumescent strips retrospectively fitted, but you can’t make a door into a fire door just by adding some strips and an overhead closer.

BM Trada have 23 Accepted Repair Techniques, and allow Certified maintainers to use these ARTs to maintain fire doors back to their original intended purpose as fire rated door assemblies. Fire Door Experts can then issue a Record of Maintenance Activity once the work is completed, along witht an O&M folder with all required fire test evidence, giving the building’s Responsible Person an audit trail of what was fitted, using what technique, on which date and by whom. This is vital information when looking after passive fire protection equipment.

The same level of detail is behind the Q-Mark door installation scheme, providing our clients with the knowledge that factory tested door-sets are being installed to the highest standards. That’s our opinion anyway, why not engage with us on your next fire door project and see the difference?!

This is what our site team have found behind a frame of an existing fire door in a live hospital ward.  The wall has been loosely filled with timber off-cuts and newspaper!

Fire stopping correctly between the back of door frames and the wall sub-structure (behind the architraves) is a critical part of a fire door-sets function. As important as the door leaf itself, fire stopping enables the door-set to restrict the passage of cold smoke and fire for the specified period of time.

Yet it is one of the main areas where we constantly find it neglected, or worst still not carried out at all.  All fire door-set installations and existing fire door assemblies that are being maintained must have fire stopping between the back of frame and sub-structure. This must be carried out as per the manufacturers installation instructions and as per BS 8214 (2016).

Not having the correct materials behind the architraves means fire-doors are totally ineffective for what they were designed for.  This is why all fire door-sets should be installed by third party accredited installers.

Materials that should be used vary depending on the depth of the void, it’s not just a case of filling up the gaps with something inflammable! Intumescent material and intumescent mastic as specified in the fire door-sets’ installation instructions or the fire certificate data sheet should be used to fill any gaps.

Gaps up to 10mm – intumescent mastic tested to BS 476: Part 20: 1987 and EN1366-4

Gaps between 10mm and 20mm – non-combustible mineral fibre material for linear joints which is then encapsulated with intumescent mastic as above.

Gaps in excess of 30mm – timber packer infills the same density as the frame.

Once this work has been completed and the installation detail has been checked, architrave should then be fitted as they often form an integral part of the fire door assembly and its ability to provide effective passive fire protection.

What should should never, ever, ever be used is random timber off-cuts and rolled up newspaper!!

Here at Fire Door Experts we are looking forward to the upcoming Fire Safety Bill as this, long awaited legislation will hopefully provide clear guidelines on the statutory obligations of landlords, building owners, operators and Responsible Persons with regards to their fire doors.

However, what we are concerned about is that there still does not appear to be 1 governing body with regards to the standards that fire doors should be maintained to.  There are various third party accreditations schemes which contractors can become members of (we are accredited to BM Trada’s Q-Mark scheme for both fire door installations and fire door maintenance), which have very strict procedures and accepted repair techniques that are permitted to be carried to maintain fire door assemblies back to their originally intended fire rating.

Any other works deemed as ‘upgrades’ (for example, retrospectively routing in intumescent seals to a ‘nominal’ door leaf) are not accepted repair techniques and therefore neither are these endorsed, nor are they covered under the Q-mark scheme.

So how does this leave end users, landlords, building owners and Responsible Persons when determining the standard to accept when maintaining their fire doors under a third party accreditation scheme, when they are receiving detailed fire door survey reports which conflict between permitted repair techniques across different third party accreditation schemes?

This has large cost implications as where one report can state to rout combined cold smoke intumescent seals into a door leaf that does not currently have any, to another scheme recommending the same door to be replaced for a proven and tested fire door leaf.

Surveying fire door assemblies is a very technical, skilled discipline which can take years to learn and understand.  Yet we are aware of 1 day courses that you can attend. At the end of the day you are classed as a fire door inspector and can start surveying fire doors and producing reports and recommendations to clients.

We were therefore not surprised to recently receive a bulletin from a company with an extensive property portfolio, stating that due to conflicting reports and recommendations they have received from fire door contractors engaged in surveying fire doors across their portfolio, all of whom were surveying the existing doors under different third party accreditation schemes, that they have made the decision to create their own internal guidelines to comply with their legal obligations to maintain their fire doors, in their own words as ‘broadly compliant!’, all of which will be carried out in-house by their general maintenance team.

We can only think that their rationale here is if there is not one industry standard with one voice and clear direction on fire door maintenance standards, their only option is to create their own standards and proceed with their fire door maintenance on this basis.

As experts in the supply, installation and maintenance of fire doors, we’re very proud to have been early adopters of BM Trada’s Fire Certification programme (we have Certificate No. 001 – you can’t get any earlier than that!). We strongly believe Trada offers the most comprehensive and reliable service to building owners, landlords and Responsible Persons. By following their Accepted Repair Techniques, we can assure you of the integrity and performance of the building’s fire doors post maintenance as there are no options for ‘maybe’ under their scheme.

A prime example being something we touched on earlier; the presence, or otherwise, of intumescent strips. BM Trada dictate if there are no strips present, it can’t be a factory tested fire door; if it was, the strips would be present. Adding intumescent strips does not turn a regular door into a fire door.

Why take the risk with such vital pieces of passive fire protection aka life saving apparatus?! Some of you will remember the old Everest double glazing adverts, “If you want the best…” That still holds true!!

As fire door maintenance experts, we welcome the upcoming Fire Safety Bill. This is set to stipulate fire doors in all blocks of flats will need to be checked every 3 months.

This proposed new law comes from phase one of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, where it has been recommended that building owners or managers of every residential building containing separate dwellings should “be required by law to carry out checks at not less than three-monthly intervals to ensure that all fire doors are fitted with effective self-closing devices in working order”.

The government were initially adopting a ‘should be routinely checked’ approach, despite contrary recommendations from the Chair of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. However, Housing Secretary, Robert Jenrick, has stated the new Fire Safety Bill will include all of the recommendations of the Grenfell Inquiry, and will be implemented “very swiftly”.

This will see a major shift in the thinking around fire door maintenance; despite being such valuable parts of a building’s fire compartmentalisation plans, there is currently no specific legislation requiring fire doors to be checked!

While we welcome the introduction of this legislation to improve overall fire door maintenance, we have to echo the thoughts of Kevin Underwood, Technical Director of the British Woodworking Federation:

“Quarterly checks might be suitable for domestic fire doors, but are not adequate for high-risk, high-usage doors. For instance, doors in corridors in busy areas may be more or less constantly in use, meaning that the risk of damage is high.

There are also fire doors where their contribution to a building’s fire safety is very important, which means they should be inspected even more frequently.

Fire door inspection has to be a risk-based approach.”

If you are a building owner, manager or Responsible Person, why not ask us about our Planned Preventative Maintenance Scheme?

Using our BM Trada Q-Mark Third Party Accreditation for fire door maintenance and installation, we can provide a regular, cost effective and professional maintenance programme to keep your fire doors at optimum performance. More information can be found here, or why not give us a call?

Fire Door Surveys vs Fire Risk Assessments

SPA Limited have recently engaged Fire Door Experts for our expertise as fire door contractors. We have recently carried out a number of fire door surveys across London looking at both the fire door assemblies and the fire compartmentation of the buildings in  question – and highlighted some serious areas of concern!

Thankfully, SPA appreciate our knowledge in the field of passive fire protection, and engaged us to survey the properties and not just work off the Fire Risk Assessments provided by the end client. While the majority of FRA’s include very useful information, they all have a paragraph along the lines of “We recommend a fire door survey is undertaken by a fire door specialist” . This often gets overlooked, and we’re regularly engaged to carry out work based on the comments in the Fire Risk Assessment alone.

One such recent survey highlighted that the Fire Risk Assessment had only covered one part of the multi-story building – which left a number of fire doors excluded from the survey and asset register, and two riser cores unidentified completely! To make matters worse, the three risers were all ‘protected’ by non-fire rated door assemblies!

While we appreciate companies are looking to reduce overheads, cutting corners on something as important as passive fire protection can be a false economy. Working off the FRA may improve the condition of your fire doors, but as experienced fire door contractors, we would confidently place a large bet that doors would still require work to make them fully compliant. A regular ‘repair’ reported is a lack of intumescent strips, with recommendations to rout the door leaves in order to fit new strips. BM Trada are clear on this point: should no intumescent strips be present, it’s not a factory tested fire door-set, so requires replacing.

It really does pay to do it right first time!

Fire Door Experts are very pleased and excited to be launching our new “Fire Door Experts 360^©” Planned Preventative Maintenance service!

This new exciting service provides our clients with regular, auditable records of fire door maintenance and inspection. As we’re sure you can imagine, “Fire Door Experts 360^©” has already generated quite a reaction amongst new and existing clients!

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 highlights the duties of a building’s “Responsible Person” and the “general fire precautions” that fall under their remit.

An obvious measure within the Order to reduce the risk of the spread of fire on the premises is the correct specification and installation of fire doors. But in a busy building, how quickly can these measures fall below the required standard?

The Order places a legal responsibility on the “Responsible Person” to ensure that any “facilities, equipment and devices are subject to a suitable system of maintenance and are maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair by suitably competent persons“.

Historically, to comply with this, clients have been commissioning expensive surveys and subsequently costly repairs carried out every few years. Fire doors are then generally forgotten about again until the next problem arises when clients are faced with unexpected expenses.

Fire Door Experts can remove the stress and strain of the Order!!

By subscribing to our “Fire Door Experts 360^©” Planned Preventative Maintenance service, clients save money! As a result, the cost of inspections and minor repairs are spread out while clients are demonstrating compliance with their statutory obligations with regard to fire safety.

Benefits of our service include;

• Fixed cost service, enabling better financial planning and control.
• Regularly updated asset register of your building’s fire door assemblies.
• The “Responsible Person” fulfils their obligations under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005.
• Fully BM Trada Q-Mark Accredited service, complying with the highest industry standards.
• ‘Record of Maintenance Activities’ forms issued for each door for inclusion in the building’s O&M Manual showing auditable records of ‘Fire Door Maintenance’.
• Bespoke plans per client; door by door, building by building.

To find out more about this new, exciting opportunity, speak to our expert team!