Fire Doors – more than meets the eye
Fire doors are a crucial part of any building’s passive fire protection strategy, often passed by without a second thought. But, behind each fire door is a complex manufacturing process and rigorous standards, as Steve Goodburn, Pyroguard’s Business Development Director, explains here….
As highlighted in this year’s Fire Door Safety Week campaign, fire doors are essential for preventing the spread of a fire, saving lives and protecting property. Their manufacture and installation involves numerous critical factors and the industry faces ongoing challenges year after year to ensure these standards are met.
A system approach
Since the 2017 Grenfell disaster, the concept of taking a system approach has gained prominence in the built environment. The Hackitt review into Building Regulations and Fire Safety emphasised the need to view buildings holistically – as interconnected systems made up of multiple sub-systems. This shift calls for rethinking construction practices and considering every component’s role within the larger structure.
In fire safety, adopting a system approach is essential for making informed specification and installation decisions. However, this remains a significant challenge, particularly in the fire door safety market, where isolated solutions can compromise the effectiveness of the entire fire protection strategy. For example it is common during a refit to replace a door leaf and retain the frame. However, this is a dubious practice given that the leaf may not have been previously tested in a frame of the same style as the installed frame and that the characteristics of the frame (e.g. timber density, fixing method to the wall) is likely to be unknown.
Fire doors are perhaps the best, and most complex, example of this in action, made up of individual fire safe products that have been brought together and tested as an approved system. Each individual product plays an important role in its overall fire protection value, from the glass to the intumescent strips and ironmongery, such as hinges and letterboxes. Any step to alter these components, whether as part of a building refurbishment or simply a desire to swap out the letterbox for an alternative style, can lead to serious consequences in the event of a blaze.
Wired vs Clear
This has been another challenge for the fire door market in recent years, and indeed the wider fire safety industry, as the global shortage of wired safety glass has impacted on fabricators, processors and manufacturers. While wired glass has historically been the product of choice for glazed fire doors – in many ways, the original fire safety glass; the supply shortage forced companies to look elsewhere for their cuttable fire safety glass needs.
While the supply of wired glass is now resuming, although certainly not up to pre-2022 levels, it raises the question of ‘why go back, when we’ve moved forward?’
Looking at today’s market and there are now a host of new, clear fire safety solutions that offer the industry more, not just in terms of enhanced aesthetics but performance too. Substituting wired for clear glass can not only help achieve a higher fire rated classification but also deliver greater impact resistance, acoustic ratings and light transmission values, providing added levels of performance on all levels. Could this have been the catalyst for change the cuttable fire glass market needed?
Fire Regulations
While Fire Door Safety Week continues to promote a safety led approach, it’s clear that value engineering remains a challenge that we are still fighting against today. It’s important we all look to pass test standards with a clear safety margin, rather than try to squeeze past or just do the minimum required.
The planned shift of British Standards (BS) to European (EN) Standards in 2029 may change all of this – a topic of much conversation within the industry. This will mark a huge change, particularly within the timber door market, which has long relied on BS standards for testing.
While potentially a positive advancement for the industry in terms of fire safety, EN standards are renowned for posing more rigorous and challenging testing requirements. This is mainly because it involves a physically different way of reading the temperatures within the furnace, leading to a more aggressive rise in furnace temperature at the start of the test. This can shave several minutes off the expected performance of a product previously designed for a BS testing regime.
As a result, the change from BS to EN may necessitate the redesign and retesting of numerous products, potentially leading to the temporary withdrawal of door systems from the market during this transitional phase.
As business owners, it is important that we all take a proactive approach and actively work to protect our businesses against potential industry or regulation shifts, such as this.
Pyroguard Advance
At Pyroguard, we’ve been testing to the EN standard for many years, including Pyroguard Advance, our high-performance fire safety glass. This next generation of cuttable glass is certified for use across a wide range of steel and timber profiles and provides EW classification with a fire resistance of 30 or 60 minutes, even at larger certified pane sizes. The Pyroguard Advance range also includes a multi-functional double-glazed fire safety glass designed for the market and regulatory requirements of external doorsets. This product is already composite door approved, in accordance with EN1634-1 for external doorsets and EN356 anti-attack tested.
For more information, please contact us.