Fire Door Surveys

The key to passive fire protection lies in preventing fire from spreading from it’s original source, providing occupants with adequate time to evacuate and allowing firefighters to intervene effectively. One of the crucial components of protection is fire doors, designed to prevent the spread of fire and smoke within your premises.

However, given their frequent functional use, fire doors are at greater risk to damage and misuse. This is why it’s key to conduct regular surveys and promptly address any issues. This proactive approach not only helps prevent the need for replacements but, most importantly, ensures your buildings remain compliant with fire safety regulations.

What’s involved?

Our team of third-party accredited inspectors, examine every component of the doorset to determine their condition, including:

• Door leaf
• Door frame
• Glazing (vision panels)
• Intumescent door strip and cold smoke seals
• Ironmongery
• Self-closing devices
• Hinges
• Signage

These inspections often uncover issues, resulting in remediations or replacements of doors to ensure compliance with fire safety standards, and new installations are delivered in a fire compliant state, underwritten by Third Party certification and / or fire test evidence.

We provide detailed reports documenting the condition together with recommendations for remediation and repair solutions to bring the door back to its original condition. Golden Thread Fire Delay makes every effort to remediate a fire door to a compliant status, under third-party accreditation, before considering a replacement. Replacements will only be carried out if the fire door is impossible to remediate or it is uneconomical.  

We can provide full costs alongside your report, should you require it, for remediation of any defects found.

Fire Compartment Surveys

Inspection of service penetrations and defects in compartmentation, by trained professionals to a third-party accreditation standard. 

A typical fire compartmentation survey involves inspecting:

• Fire compartment walls.
• Floor slabs.
• Soffits.
• Fire-resisting doors
• Gaps, voids and defects, including those in the loft space and at the perimeter edge, to assess their fire compliance. However, it can be limited to specific elements such as service penetrations, gaps, and other imperfections in fire walls if required.

In addition to the fire compartmentation, we can investigate other built-in fire rated elements such as protection to the building’s structural steels and fire rated ceilings.

These surveys can be either:

• Comprehensive: This involves a detailed inspection of the fire compartmentation of the building, where we will photograph and electronically record every defect, including marked drawings and schedules. The detailed documentation allows for the required remedial work to be accurately priced. 
• Indicative: Focuses on identifying non-compliance issues. It can detail all or various building elements and report issues found, together with photos and their locations to clearly indicate and record generic defects; providing ‘ballpark’ budget figures and recommendations if required.

The survey can be conducted:

• Visually (non-invasive), invasively, or using a combination of both methods.

• Note: Invasive surveys investigate elements hidden from view (such as intumescent closer devices around pipes, sealing of joints and wall construction verification) allowing examination of fire seals in line with technical details and compliance requirements.

Given the various survey options available, we will agree on the format and composition of the Survey Report before starting the work to ensure the information is compiled with the necessary detail and in the required format.