Fire doors are crucial for safety, yet their weight often causes residents to remove door closers, compromising fire protection. Pete Davies of Fireco highlights how free-swing devices can address this by ensuring doors close properly during emergencies.
For those of us who know our RRFSOs from our BS7273-4s, there’s no question that fire doors save lives; that the weight associated with operating a fire door is a necessary evil, a symptom of those innocuous-looking closers that ensure doors can shut safely. But when we think about who uses those doors on a daily basis, are we expecting too much from residents?
We know that effort is made to educate ‘non-fire safety’ people on the importance of fire doors, but I believe that for most, this doesn’t stick. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think for a moment this is a deliberate and malicious attempt to ignore sound, tried and tested guidance. I just think that for most people who use fire doors daily, fire protection is something that the fire and rescue services do, rather than something they should be mindful of when, say, opening the door to their flat.
Ah, the humble flat entry door. Give a thought to this oft-overlooked bit of kit. A lot of science goes into the design of these doors to ensure maximum fire protection and that each installation is instructed by years of experience and best practice guidance. The importance of doors being able to close safely with integrity uncompromised cannot be overstated. But does the resident know this? More importantly, do they really care?
Disengaged door closers are becoming a massive problem within social housing and general-purpose flats. For most residents, flat entry doors are nothing more than a barrier to their home, a hurdle to overcome. And what happens? Out comes the screwdriver, off comes the closer and hey-presto! Suddenly that barrier is beaten, the hurdle hurdled. Magically, the door to their home is suddenly lighter and easier to use!
It would be easy to assume that the only residents likely to struggle getting past the door to their flat would either be elderly or disabled, but this isn’t so. Everyone is inconvenienced by heavy fire doors. Struggling to get into one’s apartment is not exclusive to the elderly or those who rely on mobility aids. They irritate people of all abilities and age ranges. Fire doors do not discriminate.
The Extent of the Problem
A conversation with a customer at a local authority in Southern England highlighted this. A survey of 6,000 flat entry doors in general-purpose flats identified 1,700 doors with disengaged or removed closers. That’s over 28% of their doors. Another, Housing Association, told us recently that a staggering 40% of closers were missing from flat entry doors in general needs accommodation. In an analysis of Grenfell survivors’ statements to the inquiry, it’s suggested that 56% of doors had missing self-closing devices. More recently, the devastating fire at Twin Parks, NYC, was allowed to quickly spread throughout the building, largely because the door to the flat where the fire originated did not close behind the residents as they evacuated.
Isn’t it time, then, to start using free-swing devices (which bypass the resistance/closing mechanism until they receive a suitable signal from a fire alarm) on flat entry doors as standard? There’s a massive risk of doors being made non-compliant purely because of how heavy they are. But to use these types of products, we need a way to actuate the device so that it can close the door in an emergency. How do we do that when there is no fire alarm?
In most general needs blocks, each flat is designed to be a 60-minute fire-resisting compartment, commonly, using a stay-put policy, with BS5839-6 detectors in the flats themselves, where, crucially, the highest risk of fire comes from.
In the UK, BS 7273-4 requires flat entrance doors to be part of a critical system. This means that any free-swing devices fitted to these doors need to be able to fail-safe on a fault signal from the fire alarm panel. In a majority of social housing premises, especially high-rise blocks of flats, there is no alarm and detection, other than the individual smoke detectors in the flats themselves.
Maybe, if the ‘Responsible Person’ has had one installed, other detection equipment such as sprinkler or AOV systems could be used to actuate the devices. This means that, assuming that relevant detectors are in the individual accommodations themselves, you could use these systems to actuate free swing devices on flat entrance doors.
Perhaps a variation would be more ‘reasonably practicable’? After all, Clause 6 of BS 7273-4 allows for variations to the recommendations of the standard, subject to a suitable risk assessment, and approval from all interested parties (the Responsible Person, the resident, the Premises Manager, the Installer, the local fire authority etc), and requires the variation to be noted on the commissioning certificate. Simple enough, right? The problem is, even though many more people are embracing variations where they offer a viable solution, some remain scared of thinking that far outside of the box.
In reality, finding a compliant solution for this problem can be tricky, with BS 7273-4 already known for being an awkward standard to comply with. The issue of how to effectively deal with the problem of disengaged and tampered closers is a head-scratcher, for sure.
Pete Davies is business development manager at Fireco