fire door advice please

[alfi]

Hi folks,

Two points to clarify

If office doors open onto a corridor that leads to the final exit door and are 30 FD (not dead end) do they need door closures, the corridor is approx 20m in length, there are exits at both end, one onto a protected staicase (which has door closures on) and one through an office onto an external staircase
the 2nd question on this corridor they have removed the door to the tea point, it is only a small room but opens right onto the corridor. The building has a an L1 fire alarm system and good signs and emergency lighting all upto code

any comments on compliance here?


Cheers

[nearlythere]

Ans 1
Generally no unless some are needed to be SC so as to prevent heat and smoke flanking any separation of the corridor or are needed to provide double door protection to a single stairway condition.

Ans 2
If only a low risk tea point then most likely not other than if Ans 1 applies.

[jokar]

Generally only sleeping risk, dead ends and corridors which are utilised by different occupancies need to be fire resisting.  Kitchens need not be enclosed with fire resistance and therefore with the limited inforamtion supplied the answers given by the first responder are correct.

[Davo]

Agreed lol

davo

[deaconj999]

Also, from your description of the corridor, they don't need to be FD 30 either. However, depending on the level of advice you want to give, it is a good idea to advise the RP that the doors should be closed when the building is unoccupied, i.e. at the end of the working day - in an effort to reduce smoke and/or fire damage.

Removing the door from the Tea Point, for convenience no doubt, is bad practice nevertheless. Even if the tea room is low risk, consider how the source of hot water is made. Wall mounted boilers have sometimes in the past dried up and caught fire, causing plenty of smoke damage to the rest of the adjacent area.

[Phoenix]

deaconj999 makes two good points.  

One: the doors to the corridor don't have to be fire doors at all.  

And (more importantly) two: even though there is no requirement for fire doors, there should be doors on all rooms (including the tea room).  Without a door on the tea room the effect is that the whole corridor becomes the access room for all rooms off it that become inner rooms.  Now this may be dealt with by putting smoke detection in the corridor (and I see that this building has L1 coverage so that should be ok) but care should be taken that false alarms aren't likely from the steam from the tea room.  Alternatively put the door back.

This is what ADB says:

"Where a corridor that is used as a means of escape, but is not a protected corridor, is enclosed by partitions, those partitions provide
some defence against the spread of smoke in the early stages of a fire, even though they may have no fire resistance rating. To maintain this defence the partitions should be carried up to the soffit of the structural floor above, or to a suspended ceiling and openings into rooms from the corridor should be fitted with doors, which need not be fire doors."

Stu

[alfi]

Thanks Gents