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!