What is Fire Door Inspection?
Fire door inspections are relatively simple procedures that involve checking a building’s fire doors. These comprehensive checkups involve looking at every element of the fire doors, from the hinges, seals, latches, locks, and more. Maintenance teams regularly perform these inspections to determine the safety and effectiveness of their fire doors. This ensures that fire doors always operate as needed and can provide a crucial protection layer for people inside the building during an emergency.
Importance
It’s important to ensure that your fire doors are functional and can protect people in the event of a fire or other emergency. To do this, building managers must conduct regular fire door inspections to assess the state of their fire doors and apply corrective actions as necessary
As durable doors designed to provide people with a safe and efficient exit route during emergencies while also giving them protection against fire and smoke, malfunctioning fire doors can have dire consequences.
Fire door inspections are a requirement for many buildings in various locations. So, fire door inspections, done at least once a year, are essential for code compliance. Additionally, many insurance policies require buildings to undergo regular fire door inspections as part of the terms of their policy.
Elements of Fire Door Inspection
Fire door inspection processes may vary from building to building. This is because different doors have unique components and features that need regular checkups. However, there are some elements of fire door inspections that remain constant, including:
- Door labelling and certification
- Door and frame integrity
- Hardware and seals
- Clearance and gaps
- Self-closing and latching mechanisms
- Auxiliary hardware
- Signage
A Step-by-Step Guide to Fire Door Inspections
Again, the specific steps to your fire door inspections may be different depending on your needs. However, there are still a few constant steps and phases to a fire door inspection that your team must perform to ensure they cover all bases.
Planning
The first step in conducting a thorough fire door inspection is planning. The team must sit down and determine the scope and objectives of their inspection. That way, it will be much easier to determine the best course of action and the ideal schedule for the inspections.
Familiarization
Once there’s an initial plan, the next step is researching and learning about different building codes and regulations in your area around fire door inspections. This helps you determine what you need to check during the inspection, how often you must conduct them, and more.
Pre-Inspection Preparation
From there, the next step is prepping for the actual inspection. This involves gathering the inspection documents and tools like tape measures, flashlights, and even cameras for documentation. Additionally, you will have to notify building occupants that you will conduct an inspection.
Inspection
After notifying occupants and gathering tools, the team can conduct the actual inspection. It’s important that they refer to a single comprehensive inspection document or checklist to ensure that they leave no stone unturned. Also, this ensures uniform inspections, making collecting data and applying necessary corrective actions much easier.
Testing
On top of visually inspecting the doors, testing their functionality is important. Make sure that the maintenance team tests the hinges, locking systems, and other aspects of the fire door before fixing the documents. That way, you can rest assured that all the doors are fully functional and ready for use in case of an emergency.
Documentation
It’s important for the team to document the inspection process. This ensures transparency and also gives managers a point of reference when they want to check on how often and how well teams conduct inspections. For better documentation, we highly suggest photo and video attachments as well.
Reporting
Once the documents have been gathered, the team has to generate a report on the inspection. A detailed report of the inspection allows managers to have a quick, but comprehensive view of any issue that maintenance workers may have found, making it much easier to ensure functionality of fire safety doors.
Follow-Ups
Fire door inspections aren’t a one-time thing. It’s important for your team to conduct regular follow-ups and maintenance checks after the initial inspection. You never know when an issue may arise with your fire doors, which is why follow-ups are necessary.
Leon Altomonte
