03 Types of Inspections for Fire Resisting Doors; and here’s why.
Passive fire protection is an integral and important component of fire protection and fire safety in buildings. Effective fire compartmentation is required to preserve life and protect buildings, their contents and other assets.
Fire and smoke resisting doors in fire walls play a critical role in controlling and restricting fire and smoke spreading from its source uninhibited, to achieve the required degree of containment and thereby ensuring the fire evacuation strategy can be achieved with life safety risk and disruption minimised.
Golden Thread Fire Delay Ltd has sponsored several Reference Documents advocating 3 types of inspections for fire resisting doors. The original Reference Document was written by a NAHFO London (National Association of Healthcare Fire Officers) working group and all have been extensively peer reviewed by LFB (London Fire Brigade), BRE/LPCB, Aviva, Lorient, IHEEM, Humphrey and Stretton and had a Foreword written by NFCC (National Fire Chiefs Council) Lead Officer; Mark Andrews, who says:
“This guide will assist in ensuring that fire doors are correctly specified, procured, installed and well maintained throughout the life-cycle of the installation. It represents a positive step forward in fire door design and maintenance and will assist both NFCC and NAHFO to continue to help healthcare landlords comply with regulation and crucially assist in keeping some of the most vulnerable people in our community safe from harm.”
The Reference Documents explain that fire resisting doors and the method of their inspection can be classified into three generic types:
Type 1: A prescriptive one, including invasive elements, that would typically take place soon after the doors have been installed to see if they are as specified and intended to meet Building Regulation and other required standards. This would normally methodically compare what has been installed with the door’s specification details and the manufacturer’s sponsored UKAS or equivalent evidence of performance to confirm compliance or raise any issues.
Type 2: A robust but potentially pragmatic and flexible one, which could be purely visual or may contain invasive elements, carried out on existing fire doors in occupied buildings where there is often no evidence of performance and where no, or little, information exists. This type of inspection is to comply with the Regulatory Reform (Fire
Safety) Order 2005 (hereafter referred to as the FSO); assessing if the condition of each fire door is suitable and sufficient in terms of meeting and maintaining the requirements of both the building’s fire risk assessment and its fire evacuation strategy to protect relevant people and ensure safe evacuation or protection in the event of a fire.
Type 3: Undertaken on fire doors that have already been Type 1 or Type 2 inspected, where the doors are known to meet / have met the standard of fire compliance required and where a paper trail exists. This type of inspection is intended to ensure that suitably compliant fire doors are maintained to a recognised, functional standard, to comply with the FSO, under Articles 17 & 38, which require that fire doors and other life safety components are systematically managed and maintained in an efficient and effective way to minimise life safety risk.
To be clear; it is only necessary to complete a Type 1 inspection OR a Type 2 inspection once, and then regularly inspect or survey the fire resisting doors with Type 3 inspections.
Irrespective of what type of inspection is carried out, there should ideally be a full set of fire strategy drawings in place, showing the location and intended rating of fire compartmentation and of all fire doors, together with a fire door schedule for each building. In older buildings, existing plans will often be out of date and determining compartmentation boundaries and their required levels of fire resistance may need to be clarified. All fire door sets should physically have a unique identifying number and fire door schedules should, where possible, include the door manufacturer’s name and reference to the relevant Primary Test Evidence or Global Fire Resistance Assessment (GFRA) Report to which it should comply, along with other relevant information to meet the requirements of Regulation 38 of the Building Regulations and to effectively manage and maintain the doors in compliance with Articles 17 and 38 of the FSO.
As per Dame Judith Hackitt’s recommendations in her independent report following the Grenfell Tower fire, all fire door inspections should be electronically recorded using software such as Bolster, that have the flexibility to accommodate the 3 inspection Types outlined in the Reference Documents, to provide a ‘golden thread’ of information that can be used as the foundations of a robust electronic ‘audit trail’ for managing remediation and future ongoing inspections. It will assist their maintenance in a suitably compliant state in keeping with statutory requirements and ensure they do not deviate from the Primary Test Evidence, GFRA or product-specific BS EN test and that LPCB or equivalent independent Third Party audited certification, covering their fire compliance, remains valid.
Further, a doorset or fire door assembly may fail if the structure into which it adjoins or is installed will not provide the required and intended period of fire resistance. Inspections should therefore examine what surrounds the door to record potential or obvious weak spots that may or will allow the overall fire compartmentation to fail.
Completing Type 1 inspections or Type 2 inspections and then completing ongoing functional fire door inspections (Type 3 inspections) means that the Type 3 inspections can consider the criticality of the fire resisting door, in terms of location, its frequency of use or its likelihood of impact damage.
It should be borne in mind that BS 9999 is a guidance document, not mandatory, and does not consider the CRITICALITY of the door in terms of location, its FREQUENCY OF USE or its LIKELIHOOD OF IMPACT DAMAGE. These are all important factors which should be considered when determining inspection frequency of fire resisting doors in residential buildings that are less than 11 metres in height and not governed by mandatory checks:
Criticality:
How important the fire door is to the occupants should be considered in line with any PEEPS and other fire safety factors relevant to the building.
Frequency of use:
Service riser cupboard doors, for example, may be critical to the overall fire containment in a building, but providing they were initially installed correctly or have been subsequently inspected and upgraded to a satisfactory standard, their infrequent use may mean they only require a small number of checks to take place once a year or arguably even less frequently. In contrast a stairwell door that is also ‘containment critical’ but potentially opened and closed numerous times a day may need to be inspected on a weekly or even daily basis.
Doors that are used frequently are more likely to be susceptible to general damage or wear. There are three levels of usage in this example, however this may be varied where manufacturer’s guidance is available or robustness of door is established:
High – typically cross corridor doors, stairwell doors and other doors likely to be opened regularly (more than 100 times in 24 hours)
Medium – typically cleaning cupboard or caretaker room doors, likely to be opened between 10 and 100 times per day (24 hours)
Low – typically service and plant room doors likely to be opened less than 10 times per month