This Fire Door Safety Week, let’s all commit to building a safer future

Hurst Doors Sales Director Mark Atkinson supports Fire Door Safety Week. He believes the sector needs to do all it can to educate stakeholders on how they can contribute to maintaining fire safety – and explains the story behind the development of the Neuma fds fire door system.

Hurst Doors Sales Director Mark Atkinson

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

This event 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?

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 through to the installer, landlord and tenant.

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

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

We need to ensure that manufacturers hold third party certification, that products hold the necessary accreditations, and installers are competent and understand how critical it is to follow fire door installation guides to the letter.

We need landlords to understand the vital importance of routine inspections, and for tenants to realise that issues, no matter how small, should not go unreported.
Sadly, we know that people are six times more likely to report an issue with their heating than they are one with their fire doors.

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

Hurst Doors' new FDS fire door

Consistent, reliable performance
As a single business, our ability to affect wholesale change in the sector is relatively limited.

We do our utmost to educate our customers, suppliers and other key stakeholders we interact with. However, we believe the biggest contribution we can make is to ensure we provide a GRP composite fire door that is proven to consistently perform.

It was that desire to create a fire door product the sector can rely on, 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 undergone more than 30 bi-directional tests at three independent accredited European test labs, with sixty individual door sets tested.

In a 30-minute furnace test, the 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 EN1634-1:2014 standard, and testing has been completed on both solid and glazed door options, with or without overhead fanlights, and with glazed side panels.

All stages of the Neuma fds supply chain, up to and including the doorset manufacturer, are third-party certified to the BM Trada Q-Mark certification scheme.

Putting fire safety in the spotlight
Fire Door Safety Week 2022 will be a reminder to people around the country of the importance of fire safety – and we hope that it encourages them to be constantly on the lookout for ways to maintain and improve it.

Whilst we’re sure Fire Door Safety week will remain a firm fixture in the construction industry calendar for many years to come, it is incumbent on us all to ensure that raising awareness of fire doors and fire door safety continues to be a priority focus throughout the year.

For more information, please call 01482 790790 or visit: www.hurstdoors.co.uk