Summary of changes in new approved document B, Volume 1 Dwelling houses in which will affect building a loft conversion.

This will become a major problem for the Loft conversion industry and for the customers wanting to convert there lofts.

You can read my fire regs post to see how the regs stand at the present date (pre April 7th 2007) but for every one who hasn’t or wont have time to serve the initial notice to the local authority before 7th April, will have to now build the loft to the new approved Document B.

These fire regs have been divided into two Volumes; Volume 1 covers Dwelling houses which is for houses, and Volume 2 is for every thing else including flats.

New Provisions that have been introduced are as follows:

The rescue window at the front of the house normally called the Velux M08 emergency velux has now been considered impractical. This window was designed for fire fighters to erect a ladder from the outside to rescue you in case of a fire. Now its known as impractical and unsuitable. In some peoples minds this will be a good thing as once its installed it is very low to the floor of the loft. This becomes a safety hazzard in itself due to infants or small children being able to open the window so high (around 5m high on average) and could fall out.

But when there’s a good point with the regs you can almost definitely expect something else to now be 10 times worse.

All the doors that divide the stairscase from living rooms (habitable rooms not including w.c’s, bathrooms or shower rooms) will need to be replaced with rated FD20 Fire doors.

This will be a nightmare for all those original Victorian and Edwardian doors that are part of the original character of the house. What’s been designed is a special fire paint that will upgrade your original doors to this new standard.

Self closing devices are no longer needed on all the doors because the government know that owners are removing them because children where constantly trapping fingers and/or the automatic closers were becoming annoying to live with. And so once removed the regulation was ineffective.

This is why FD20′s are now essential.

The next ammendment is in open plan ground floors of private dwellings, the area will need to be enclosed (which is how the old document stands now) or you will need to provide sprinklers on the ground floor and separate the stairs at first floor level to provide a suitable escape from a window on the first floor in the case of a fire on the ground floor.

Smoke alarms are now required to all circulation spaces on all floors and will all have to be mains wired with a battery back up.

If you want to avoid changing all your doors or avoid painting them with a thick coat of fire paint to upgrade them, make sure you either start work on site or serve your initial building notice to your local authority on or before the 6th of April 2007.

If you do, this means you will be able to still build under the old approved document B regulations if it is what you want to do…

See our Building regs Category for more deatils.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 12:04 pm and is filed under Building Regulations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.