Building Regs for replacing doors in flat? - Help

[Paul Martin]

Hi, does anyone know about current building regs as far as replacing existing doors in a top floor flat?

I have hung many 35mm internal doors in houses and am doing a job for a friend, replacing 5 internal doors and one "front" door to the flat. When i say front door, it is inside and is between the shared stairwell and the flat hallway.

All the doors are the same 6'6" x 2'6" x 1" 3/4 (44mm). Am I right in thinking that they are firedoors? how do i tell as they are all painted, i think they are because they are thicker than normal and there seems to be a self closing device in the middle of the hinge stile which has been disconnected.

The front door is the same as all the others and from my research so far i think that regs say that this has to be a fire door rated to 30 mins.

The other five doors all lead off the flats hallway to the various rooms. Do these need to be replaced with firedoors as well?.

Thanks in advance

[Tony Bryer]

If it's three or more storeys they should be fire doors. And self closing too, though what you have is not untypical. The intention is that if there is fire within your flat (TV catches fire, carelessly discarded cigarette in lounge) the internal doors protect your route of escape from bedrooms to the flat entrance door, and this door protects the stairwell and common parts.

[adder1969]

an outside (fire) door to the stairwell means the requirements aren't so strict as if the flat front door opened straight onto the stairs but I can't back any of that up.

[Paul Martin]

question has ground floor then first then second, is this classed as the third storey or the second floor?

[Tony Bryer]

That's a three storey building. A caveat to my previous post is that what I posted is the general rule and something different may have been agreed in a particular case. But the thickness of the doors and the (disconnected) closers makes it sound like fire doors and (almost) no one installs these voluntarily.

[Paul Martin]

Thanks Tony, what you are saying makes sense. You wouldn't install fire doors given the choice, the cost and extra work involved is prohibitive. However I think that when the original conversion took place building control played a significant part and renovating (only changing doors) an existing property calls for less strict regulations than a new build/conversion.

The front door onto the stairwell I am conviced should be a firedoor but the internals i think could be replaced with normal 35mm solid wood door, bit of a pain changing the stops but much cheaper for the customer which is a significant factor.

[djc]

If the front door opens direct onto the stairwell (ie there is not a door between the front door and the stairs) then there must be a 'protected lobby' inside the flat. Which in effect means there must be another fire-door between the front door and and any habitable room (bathrooms and WCs are not habitable rooms).

[adder1969]

There may also be requirements for fire seals and the type of fire door and it's probably best to speak to building control or your landlord. It could be that the front door needs to be a higher rated fire door than the others, or rather the others need to be a lesser rating than the front.

[Hugo Nebula]

On 21 Nov 2006 07:08:45 -0800, a particular chimpanzee named "Paul Martin" randomly hit the keyboard and produced:

In a properly converted building complying with the requirements of the Building Regulations, the internal hall of the flat should be 30 minutes fire resisting with FD20 doors unless the furthest point in the flat from the flat entrance door is 9m or less.

There must be a fire resisting lobby between the flat entrances and the common stair. If there are two or one flats per storey this lobby can be formed by the protected internal lobby (with FD20 doors). This sounds like the situation you describe.

In a non-compliant building, when replacing doors they must be no worse than before the work was carried out (it would be assumed that the doors had self-closers when they were installed so you would need to reinstate these).

As this is a fire safety issue, a Building Regulations application is required.