Replacing fire doors in occupied buildings can be challenging, especially when those buildings are busy hospitals!

Planning starts early on with arranging access to live wards to measure existing apertures to make sure the new doors and frames will fit.

Then each door-set and ironmongery set needs scheduling out, cross referencing and checking against the specification, floor plans and fire compartmentation plans, plus checking against our own sketches of each door-set replacement.

This is all before any fire door has been placed into manufacture!

Once on site, extensive planning is required on where to store doors and ironmongery (timber fire doors must be laid flat otherwise over time they will twist and distort out of shape), and doors required at the beginning of the install programme need to be at the top of the pile!

Relationships and trust needs to be forged between The Trusts, Ward Sisters and our site team and a detailed programme of installs agreed.

Then at the last minute all this gets turned on it’s head as wards can become overwhelmed so access is not permitted!

Over the course of the last few years here at Fire Door Experts we have surveyed, maintained and installed over 2000 fire doors in live hospitals, sometimes working 24 hours round the clock to adapt to last minute changes.

We are proud to be working closely with our NHS and main contractor clients installing and maintaining fire doors from the likes of Specialist Door Solutions, Humphrey and Stretton and Strongdor to name just but a few.

We really have grown into a dedicated, niche and nimble fire door contractor in the healthcare sector and look forward to continuing this journey with all our partners.

315 fire doors successfully maintained despite unforeseen challenges

Fire Door Experts have completed fire door maintenance work on 315 bedroom, communal and riser doors on behalf of a large student accommodation chain successfully maintaining  all doors back to their originally intended fire rating.

Under our BM Trada Q-Mark Fire Door Maintenance accreditation, we can carry out a number of Accepted Repair Techniques to make fire doors compliant, techniques such as;

1. 1. Easing and adjusting the door so it hangs correctly in the frame to ensure the perimeter margins are within tolerance.
   2. Adjusting the frame to reduce excessive gaps on the long edges of the door leaf, particularly when working on veneer finish door leaves.
   3. Increasing the height of the door by adding hardwood lipping to the bottom edge.
   4. Installing automatic drop-down seals to provide smoke control where uneven floors make tight fire door tolerances of 3mm difficult to achieve.
   5. Replacing worn hinges to ensure the free swing of doors.
   6. Adjusting, or replacing, overhead door closers to ensure the doors self-close correctly so ensuring the integrity of the fire compartment.

These are just some of the Accepted Repair Techniques used to rectify the 658 identified non-compliances and maintain these fire doors back to compliance.

Projects such as these are normally challenging enough as our team work their way through the building. This particular project was made even more challenging as students began returning ready for the start of a new term. While this doesn’t sound a particularly difficult obstacle to overcome, when we remember this was the height of the Covid restrictions, and these students were arriving from all over the world…

Following Construction Leadership Council Site Operating Procedures Guidelines, and our ever evolving site-specific Risk Assessment and Method Statement, our technicians were able to book appointments for each apartment to ensure these guidelines and our RAMS were observed. This allowed social distancing and all other Covid-19 requirements to be applied and honoured so the project could continue smoothly.

One key point that was highlighted from this project…

Student accommodation… 315 fire doors… 658 identified non-conformities… ZERO compliant fire doors in the property before we commenced work!!

Planned Preventative Maintenance is vital for any fire doors, but when you have a few hundred fire doors, with people sleeping in the property, it really should be top of the Responsible Person’s list. Please see details of our PPM initiative here >> Fire Door Experts 360^®

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.

The Home Office has introduced a new bill to improve fire safety in buildings

Building on action already taken to ensure tragedies like the Grenfell Tower never happen again, the new Fire Safety Bill amends the Fire Safety Order 2005. This clarifies that the responsible person or duty-holder for multi-occupied, residential buildings must ensure fire door maintenance is carried out regularly. This is to manage and reduce the risk of fire for entrance doors to individual flats that open into common parts of the building.

More details will emerge over the coming months, but the Fire Door Experts team welcome this new Bill as this is an area of building maintenance that is often overlooked. Fire doors often only appear on a responsible person’s radar when they become faulty – by that time, they’re endangering life, and probably have been for some time!

With such exacting tolerances, such as 3mm gaps around the leaf edges, front entrance doors need to be regularly maintained and fit for purpose. This may sound a strange comment to make – they also need to be a fire rated door-assembly in the first place!

When carrying out surveys or maintenance works, we’re often presented with doors missing vital elements such as intumescent strips and fire rated hinges. Unfortunately, it’s not just a simple job for our technicians to fit these parts to “upgrade” a door into a fire door; without these parts present, we have to assume it was never a factory tested fire door – or the intumescent strips would have been present!

Simple, regular maintenance visits by accredited fire door technicians can keep all fire doors at optimum performance levels, and providing effective passive fire protection.

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?

Quick and simple fire door checks

Here is a very useful and simple 5 step fire door check guide on whether your fire doors are compliant, or indeed whether they are fire doors… Essential information in any fire door maintenance programme!

We want to emphasise the presence of intumescent seals around the door leaf or frame, which can sometimes be concealed behind the door lippings.  We recently found concealed intumescent seals on door assemblies that we surveyed which, from an initial visual inspection, did not appear to be designed as fire rated door assemblies.

BM Trada’s message is clear regarding the presence of intumescent seals.  If intumescent seals are not present in either the door leaf or door frame, then this door-set can never have been a designed and tested fire door-set.  Retrospectively routing in intumescent seals to ‘upgrade’ this door-set is not an Accepted Repair Technique, as the repair techniques have been designed to maintain the fire door assembly back to its originally intended fire rating.

It is not possible to turn a non-fire rated door-set into a fire rated door-set, so where intumescent seals are not present in either door leaf of door frame, these door leaves (and sometimes frames), must be replaced with designed and tested fire door-sets.

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!