Fire Door Safety Week 2022: Hurst Doors commits to building a safer future

Since 2013, like dozens of other businesses throughout our sector, Hurst Doors has been marking Fire Door Safety Week by raising awareness and educating the market about the critical role fire doors play in saving lives and property.

This established annual event in the industry’s calendar provides us with the opportunity to think deeply about what ‘raising awareness’ and ‘educating the market’ means in this context. What, exactly, is the message we want to communicate and what is it we ultimately want to achieve?

Here at Hurst Doors, we believe the key insight to ensuring a safer future is that fire safety is a responsibility we all share – from the specifier, buyer and manufacturer right through to the installer, landlord and tenant.

A fire door is a complex system that, in order for it to work, relies on every stakeholder understanding their role and playing their part to ensure that system continually performs as it should.

Information and knowledge

As a sector, it’s our responsibility to provide the whole of the supply chain – all the way through to the tenant – with the necessary information and knowledge required to ensure safety products will perform in the event of a fire scenario.

We need to make certain that manufacturers are third party certified, that products hold the necessary accreditations and also that installers are competent and, what’s more, understand how critical it is to follow fire door installation guides absolutely to the letter.

Further, we need landlords to understand the vital importance of routine inspections and for their tenants to realise that, no matter how small they may appear to be, issues should never go unreported. Sadly, we know that people are six times more likely to report an issue with their heating than they are anything that relates to their fire doors.

By helping individuals throughout the industry and beyond to understand how to correctly specify, supply, install, maintain and inspect fire doors, we can ensure that people feel safer in their homes.

Consistent and reliable performance

As a single business, our ability to affect wholesale change in the sector is relatively limited. That said, we do our utmost to educate customers, suppliers and other key stakeholders with whom we interact. Ultimately, though, we believe the biggest contribution we can make is to ensure we provide a GRP composite fire door that’s proven to consistently perform.

Indeed, it was this very desire to create a fire door product on which the sector can rely that led to the development of the Neuma fds fire door system. Subjected to rigorous third party testing, the Neuma fds GRP composite fire door system has in fact undergone more than 30 bi-directional tests at three independent and accredited European test laboratories. 60 individual door sets were tested.

In one 30-minute furnace test, these fire doors achieved an average integrity of 45 minutes (or 50% longer than the FD30 standard requires).

The product has also been tested to the tougher EN 1634-1:2014 standard. Further, testing has been completed on both solid and glazed door options, with or without overhead fanlights, and also with glazed side panels.

Importantly, all stages of the Neuma fds supply chain are third party certified to the BM Trada Q-Mark certification scheme.

Fire safety in the spotlight

Fire Door Safety Week 2022, which runs from Monday 31 October until Friday 4 November, will be a reminder to people around the country of the importance of fire safety. We very much hope that it encourages them to be constantly on the lookout for ways in which to maintain and improve such safety.

While we’re certain Fire Door Safety Week will remain a firm fixture in the construction industry’s calendar for many years to come, it’s nevertheless incumbent upon us all to ensure that raising awareness of fire doors – and, by extension, fire door safety – continues to be a priority focus throughout the year.

*Further information is available online at www.hurstdoors.co.uk

**Additional detail concerning Fire Door Safety Week 2022 can be accessed at www.firedoorsafetyweek.co.uk