Fire doors (Fire Regs)
Fire Doors
Fire resisting doors also known as FD20/30′s are vital to contain smoke in a room for a sufficient time for you to become aware of the fire and able to evacuate the building safely and efficientley.
There must be 1/2 hour fire resitant partitions to separate the landing from the rooms in the new loft conversion, and the doors around the stairs must be fire check doors, and be fitted with door closers.
The code which is numbered either 20 or 30 of the fire door defines the time span of how long that door will survive in the case of a fire. The doors rating will be decided by your building inspector, and will be on your plans for the builder.
An FD20 is a fire door that lasts for 20 minutes in the case of a fire. normally 40mm thick, solid or compressed wood and will also need a door closer near the hinge so that the door will close automatically.
This is a picture of a door closer that would need to be installed on the back of all the doors around the stairs to meet building regs.
An FD30 is a 30 minute fire door and from the end of May 2007, word of mouth between Building Inspectors is that all doors around the stairs will have to now be upgraded to FD30′s.
This is not good news for all the owners of beautiful Victorian and Edwardian houses with their original doors that are part of the history and character of their house…
We believe that there will be a special paint that the existing doors can be covered in to give them the fire protection to meet the new fire regs. For more details ask your builder or Building control officer.
This regulation also goes for any glass in existing doors around the stairs, it will need to be replaced with either a wired glass, the sort of glass that is found in most schools. (click on the picture to enlarge the sample) This is the cheapest sort of fire glass at around £150 per m2 but looks quite cheap. The second grade of fire glass is called Pyroglass and even though it’s more expensive at around £300 per m2 it looks like real glass, It is basically the same glass that is used in oven facias. You buy all the fire glass made to measure and fitting would cost around £50 or so direct with your builder. You must really love your existing doors to take up this option…
Unfortunately this also means any glass panels above doors including fan lights, glass blocks or any sort of gap between a room and stairs will all have to be blocked up permanently either by plasterboard and plaster or fire glass.
If the glass is fire proof it will have a fire proof rating stamp in one of the bottom corners etched with the British Standered BSI kite mark (see picture) triangle. Next to the Kite mark will be an ISO number similar to this BS EN ISO 12543. This specifies the grade of the glass that has been installed. This will all be checked by the inspector before it’s passed off. Visit British Standards at www.bsistandards.co.uk for more infomation.
This doesn’t effect doors that are not directly onto the stair area e.g between the lounge and dinning room. These doors can be normal glass.