Building Your Business Ep. 24: Fire Door Facts with Allegion and Lori Greene of iDigHardware

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Welcome Lori to building your business with the Certified Commercial Property Inspectors Association. Thanks Rob. I think before we fire up and just dive into it, I want to know a little bit about you. What is Lori Greene and Firedoors have to do with us? Okay, well to start with, I work for Allegion I’m the manager codes and resources for Allegion. So if you’re not…

aware of a Allegion, we’re a global security company and access company. We have a residential side and a commercial side. A lot of people know the brand Schlage, that’s one of our brands, but we have about, I think, 40 different brands under the, our umbrella and it’s a global company. So we manufacture locks and doors and panic hardware and door closers, door controls, lots of things related to fire doors. So this is actually my.

Well, next year is my fifth year in the door and hardware industry. know I started when I was 10. And last year was my 30th year with the Allegion brand. So I’ve been in the industry for a long time. And for anybody that works with doors, whether they’re inspecting them, installing them, specifying them, it’s really, really important that.

we know what the codes require so that we can do the right thing. And I think I just kind of took it to a little bit of an extreme level. And so back in the 90s, I started teaching about codes with architects, with door suppliers, door and hardware suppliers, code officials. And little by little, I just got more and more involved. And so for about 15 years, my job is totally related to codes. Not only

just fire doors, but also egress accessibility. lot of electrified hardware code requirements have changed and are very confusing. So I also work in code development. just changing the codes, making modifications to the codes. then all of that rolls up into stuff that I report out on my website, which is idighardware.com. And I saw that website. What a terrific website. And we wrote a course.

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for fire door inspections and use your website and your resources to help us. So thank you. Great, great. I’m glad it was helpful. Yeah, so for those watching, if you recall in our standards of practice for performing commercial inspections, section 17 of our commsum is devoted entirely to fire door inspections. But let’s go way before that. What actually is a fire door?

Okay. So a fire door, depending on the type of door, the door might have different construction from a conventional door, especially if it’s a wood door. The core, the different cores for the different wood doors have different ratings. So it might be a 20 minute or a 90 minute door with metal doors. There are three hour doors. So there’s, there are various ratings and that is going to tell you how much protection that door will provide.

if there’s a fire. And the doors are tested to make sure that they will withstand fire for that amount of time. But it’s not only just the door, it’s really the whole assembly. You have all the components, the door frame, the hardware, lock, panic, fire exit hardware would be panic hardware for a fire door.

door closer, anything that’s going on to that door is a component. So it’s the whole assembly that’s going to be tested just to make sure that, you know, if you think about a fire resistance rated partition in a building, if you didn’t have fire doors, any place that you had a door opening, you’d have a big three foot by seven foot hole in your fire protection. So these fire door assemblies are called opening protectives because they fill

those openings in those partitions. So if we know that it’s got to be constructed a certain way, so what is the purpose then of the fire door other than it’s the portal that we go through in the middle of that fire partition? But why are they so important? So a lot of people get confused about fire doors. They think that fire exit, you know, your egress door that leads outside is the same thing as a fire door. But really, the purpose of a fire door and doors can have more than one purpose.

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But the purpose of a fire door is to fill that opening and help compartmentalize the building to prevent the spread of smoke and fire and to protect the means of egress. So if you think about like a hotel room, the door to the hotel room is going to be a fire door, typically a 20 minute fire door. And if there’s a fire inside that hotel room, the fire door is going to stay closed and latched if it’s code compliant and working properly. It’ll stay closed and latched and it’s going to

help keep the fire within the hotel room and also protect the corridor as a means of egress for people to be able to escape. when I might have a home inspector watching this, not a commercial property but a home inspector and they’re very much used to that steel door between the attached garage and the house. Yep. And when we look at that door we’re thinking it’s got that magnetic gasket seal

It’s got a sealed threshold. It’s got, and it’s supposed to have the auto closure and all that. But when I’m sitting in my hotel room and I see that half inch, three quarter inch gap underneath it in the daylight, that’s driving me nuts. Why is that one door for the residence so much different than that hotel door?

Well, in theory, they shouldn’t be too much different because they both, think, I don’t do much with residential or as much, but I think it’s a 20 minute door typically. And the hotel room door is also going to be 20 minutes. Fire doors are allowed to have a gap at the bottom because of the way fires work and what happens during a fire and what happens during a fire test because all of these assemblies are tested.

with real fires and a real furnace, they’re allowed to have a three quarter inch gap at the bottom up to three quarters of an inch. So I think in your hotel room, maybe you’re just more you’re seeing it more because you can see the light in the hallway or something like that. So you’re noticing it more. But it is acceptable to have that gap there and it doesn’t affect how the door is going to perform if there’s a fire. Excellent. Because when I think of the residential side, they’re always worried about vapor too. They’re always worried about that carbon monoxide coming from the garage.

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in a house, but we’re not talking about that type of door, are we? We’re talking about a fire separation door that’s going to slow down that migration of fire and little smoke so that we can ostensibly, right, get out of the building. Right. That’s that’s the whole point of the fire door assembly is to compartmentalize the building, keep the fire where it is. Or, you know, if you’re in a hotel and there’s a fire in another room, theoretically in your hotel room,

where there’s no fire, you are protected from the fire in the other room or in an apartment or in an electrical room, those kinds of areas. We also see a lot of fire door assemblies in stairwells and that the purpose there is to protect that stairwell as a means of egress so that if there is a fire, the building occupants can go down the stairwell and hopefully there won’t be smoke and flames within that portion of the means of egress.

So if, if, if I’m a novice inspector, especially an inspector that might not have taken our course yet, what is the easiest way to tell that that door’s a fire door? Okay. So sometimes it gets a little tricky, but what should happen is when you look, when you open the door and you look below the top hinge, you should see a label.

on the door. There should be a label or an embossment on the frame, but usually the door is easier to find and to see the label. And that’s going to tell you that it’s a fire door assembly. Usually the rating of the door, whether it’s 20 minute, 45, et cetera, the manufacturer, other information, like what kind of hardware it’s supposed to have, different information about the door. So that’s how to tell if it’s a fire door assembly. The tricky part is

Sometimes you’ll be in a building and there will be a labeled fire door where a fire door doesn’t belong. So I was, I took an NFPA test a while back and I was in a fire station and I noticed on their bathroom door, their multi stall bathroom door with push pull hardware, which wouldn’t be acceptable for a fire door. They had a labeled fire door and frame. And I was like, Hey guys, what’s, you know, what happened here? And they’re like, that’s what was in stock at the distributor. So.

CCPIA (09:04.308)
It’s not a code issue to have a labeled door where it doesn’t belong. The issue is if you’re an inspector and you’re going around looking for fire doors that way, by looking at the actual door, you might find a door that’s labeled in a location where it doesn’t need to be a fire rated door. So it’s important to have the floor plans and to understand where the partitions are that need those opening protectives. That’s interesting. Cause I mean, you could be, yeah.

I mean, I can think of in some of the places I’ve shopped through the years, I can just buy a door slab. maybe that door slab was a fire rated door slab and the embossment and the, and that labeling is right there on the side, but they decided if it’s the opening, I got it on a wholesale. Great. they get moved from one part of the building to another part of the building. If you think about a hospital with thousands of doors, that does happen. They’ll have something in, in there.

warehouse and they’ll be like, it’s the right size. It’s the right swing. Let’s put it in. And so it was a question came up a few years ago when everyone started looking at fire door inspections and thinking, now wait, is it okay to have a labeled door where I don’t need one? So that’s been clarified in, the NFPA codes. And what did they do to clarify that? So there was confusion. Hello. I’ll try to keep it brief, but

There’s a requirement in NFPA that says that if you have a protective system, like a sprinkler system that is visible to people, that sprinkler system has to be working or if it’s not required, it can be removed. So the code officials, some of the code officials started thinking, if I have a labeled fire door,

that’s obvious to the public, it’s visible to the public, somebody might think that they will be protected behind that door. so, you know, most people, the general public does not know anything about labeled fire doors. So it just, we went through this with NFPA to see what the actual intent of the code was. And what they decided was that, no, that’s not a life safety feature that’s visible to the public. And so it’s okay to have the label.

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even if the door doesn’t require it. It’s interesting because in my mind I would go, okay, I don’t know who the next inspector is going to be. Yeah. And are they going to call that a fire door when they, might not be versed. And is there a way that I can void the stick, void the embossment by, you know, with, with some other, you know, protective thing, but yeah, I get exactly what you’re saying.

Yeah, you can remove the label, but the thing is you can’t put it back. So if you remove the label and then you think, wait, I actually do need a fire door here, or now I want to move this non-labeled fire door to another location, you can’t put the label back. you know, healthcare facilities were the ones that were really like, you got to help us figure this out and clarify the codes because, you know, they don’t want to have to go remove every single label in a place that it’s not required.

And especially a building that size that might have hundreds and hundreds of doors. Exactly. Or thousands. Yeah. Depends on the size. Yeah. Mayo clinic, thousands. Smaller places, hundreds. I remember in a previous life, I actually spent a year replacing hinges on fire doors in a hospital. Just because they didn’t, they weren’t the proper hinge.

for that placement. think it was going into operating rooms and places like that. So it was very interesting. So in this conversation, what buildings require fire doors and what kind of, you could be very general on that, but you know, in a very broad basket, what are the buildings we’re talking about that require fire doors? A lot of buildings.

Most buildings, so any building that has a fire rated stairwell within it, building where you might, in some buildings you have electrical rooms or mechanical rooms that need fire rated doors and frames, multifamily buildings and hotels. So apartment buildings, hotels, those are, there are many, many, many, many, many fire doors in those buildings.

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because every door from the corridor into the unit is going to be a 20 minute rated door. So those buildings are really important to make sure that the fire doors get inspected and that they’re code compliant and kept working properly. You know, any hospital, school, university, they’re all going to have fire doors somewhere. Then houses of worship, any places that have people assembled, correct?

It depends on the size and other things, whether you need fire doors there. That information would be found in the building code, also in the fire code, which is used throughout the life of the building. Most buildings, maybe there might be a strip mall or something where it’s not required, but most buildings, especially if they are multi-story, are going to have fire doors somewhere. And I can think of when you said strip mall, that immediately came to mind of it’s single story.

And there’s probably not a there might be a compartmentalization in tenant walls, but within the same building, within the same confines, it probably doesn’t unless, as you said, there’s a mechanical room that’s been isolated. Yes. So when we have, I don’t even want to count hundreds of thousands, millions of buildings just in North America that all have fire doors. Just because I installed it, does that mean it’s going to be perfect forever?

Well, no, that’s the problem. Even when it’s first installed, it might not be perfect. Sure. I’ve seen many, many doors that were just installed, fire doors that were just installed and the clearances aren’t correct or they’re not closing and latching properly. So that’s why the inspection requirements came to be exactly for that reason. So starting with the 2007 edition of NFPA 80, NFPA 80 is the standard.

or fire doors and other opening protectives. And that’s where you find all the detailed information about fire doors. starting with the 2007 edition, that standard has included requirements for annual inspection of fire doors. And then starting with the 2013 edition, they added an inspection upon installation and after maintenance work. So, you know, it’s been a slow process getting that.

CCPIA (15:56.458)
adopted and enforced and feel like what I’ve got to inspect every single door every year. But the thing is the end users, the owners and the facility managers of these facilities are realizing if they have a fire door inspection when the door is installed, which is now required, they’re receiving a building with code compliant fire doors. Then it’s up to them to make sure over the years that they’re having the inspections done because if you

just install it and you never look at it again, the failure rate is incredibly high actually of existing fire door assemblies in the field. I can imagine. so on those annual inspections, who can perform those? NFPA 80 says that it has to be a qualified person. there are some different ways that you can show that you’re qualified. You can take a course, you can…

have a degree if that exists. You know, there are several different examples. You have to have experience with Firedore assemblies. There are several courses and that’s one really good way to show that you have the expertise because I’ve worked with lots of installers who say, I’ve been doing this for 30 years. You know, I know what I’m doing and they may or they may not. The codes change, the standards change and not everybody is, you know, up to date on the newest.

the latest and greatest. And that’s one of the reasons why we wrote our course is, because it’s a, it’s a, it’s a necessity. mean, these buildings have to have a fire door inspection. And so when I, when I started thinking about this, I know there’s a lot of different types of doors and we’ve talked about swing doors just briefly now, which is a side hinge and it opens and closes. I mean, it’s a door, but we have a lot of other types of doors that can include.

Curtain doors, we could have sliding doors, we could have all kinds of, no, do they have to be tested as well every year or do they? NFPA 80 has different requirements for different types of doors. So for swinging doors are 13, it’s a list of 13 criteria. And there’s also a visual inspection. You’re going to test that the door closes properly. The criteria are not super.

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crazy like hard things for the door to meet. Is it closing and latching? Does it have any open holes in it? Has it been modified in a way that’s not acceptable? Is the glazing correct and stuff like that? So then when you look at sliding and rolling fire doors, NFPA has a different

section for that with another list of criteria. It’s 15 inspection criteria and the requirements are different. The things that you would look at on a rolling door, for example, would be different from a swinging door. And with a rolling door, there is a requirement for two drop tests. So the first drop test is to make sure that the door closes and it all works fine. The second one is to make sure that it automatically resets properly. So

There are some different requirements depending on the type of the door and also with rolling doors, they’re going to look at all of the different components and make sure nothing’s been painted or has anything on it that’s going to affect how the door operates. just recently I was in a building in Arkansas. That was a large community center. They didn’t had two story tall by almost 25 foot wide rolling fire doors. Wow.

that went over the glass that separated the community gymnasium space from the walking space. Because they had glass in the stairs that were part of the exit plan. So it was very interesting doors. like, I shudder to think of what it would take to do a drop test on those doors and the large noise it would make.

Well, hopefully there’s something that slows the door so it’s not actually a drop, but yeah, I can imagine that’s I’ve never run into that application on a door that big at least. Yeah, it was, it was monstrous and I, and it was fun to take some photos of it and put it into a video I was making. But again, I’m standing back going, all right, if I’m doing a fire door inspection on this building, I’m either going to exclude the drop test or I’m going to have to rent a,

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a lift to help me get this thing back up and make sure that everything is just set. Yeah. It’s complicated. Yeah. Yeah. Very much so. So, so I’m thinking in my mind, so fire doors, we’re compartmentalizing the fire. I know I’ve been on your website and I’ve seen what you have. The, the photos that you show of fire on one side of a door and the occupants on the other.

and how clean that door is. I don’t know of a better testimony in the world of why fire doors are not so serious or that much important. Yeah, most people, like I said, don’t really understand other than my children. They all understand it because they’ve seen it their whole lives. But most people that are not involved in this industry in some way really have no idea that, for example, their apartment entry door

will protect them. And they don’t know that they shouldn’t modify it. They don’t know that they shouldn’t adjust the spring hinges or the door closers so that it’s more convenient to bring their groceries in, you know. So that’s really the place where we have a problem is because of course the industry knows and then we have inspectors, but in the middle we have residents and people who are using these buildings, working in these buildings, and they don’t know that propping open

a fire door with a wood wedge creates a really big hole in their protection. Yeah, I think you actually gave us a photo of an auto closing door that actually had the wedges on chains attached to the push bar so that they didn’t walk away. Yeah, no, know, convenience is a battle that we fight all the time is that people need and want.

convenience. And so they do things to overcome not only fire protection, but also security. And yeah, I’ve got a lot of photos like that. They’re, they’re fun for me as a, an inspection geek of 40 years as well. get very, I get very excited when I see stuff like that. when I was reading through the FPA standard, it says you can’t cover a door with a piece of paper.

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more than 5 % of the door. What is 5 % of the door? Well, you’d have to calculate out the number of square inches and the square footage of the door. But yeah, there are limitations on so many things, signage, kick plates, armor plates, because those could affect how the door performs in a fire. know, the door is tested a certain way with the furnace and anything that you do to it. For example, I worked on a museum project once.

where they wanted to clad the entire farewell fire door with stainless steel. So if you think about like, just a little sign, that’s maybe harder to see how it could impact the door. But with this stainless steel cladding covering the entire door on one side, we don’t know how that door is going to react. We don’t know if it’s going to bow or bend or pop open. We don’t know. So that’s the one of the challenges is just

keeping the doors in the same kind of condition that they were in when they were tested and not just the door, but the frame and the hardware as well and the glazing. Yeah, that’s, terrific. So what haven’t we talked about so far? What am I, what am I missing? Well, this conversation about fire doors and how, how important they are for, for, for keeping, keeping people alive.

So I think one thing really to keep in mind is the multifamily housing that I mentioned because we have seen some high fatality fires in multifamily. think it’s a great opportunity to increase the safety of building occupants and get the inspectors out there doing this work. There was actually a fire, two fires in the brunks. There have been several fires over, you know, the past.

20 years that I could think of, but there were two within a fairly short number of years. think it was 2017 and 2022. And in both of these apartment fires, where theoretically they should have a fire-rated door leading to the unit, the apartment, when the families ran out of the apartment, the doors stayed open, which allowed the smoke. These were small fires. One was a…

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One was started with a child playing with knobs on a stove. And the other one was started by a space heater igniting bedding. This was not a case of huge fires that engulfed the whole building. It was a small fire that should have been able to be compartmentalized inside of the apartment. And the open door allowed the smoke to spread and to the other open doors allowed the smoke to enter the stairwells.

And so in those two fires, there were 17 fatalities in one and 13 fatalities in the other. And so when you think about had the, we had the door, the hardware, everything, the way it was supposed to be. because the people escaped and their door didn’t close behind them, it led to the deaths of their neighbors, some of their neighbors. That’s why fire door inspections are so important is because

maybe if those doors had been inspected, someone would have said, hey, the door doesn’t close properly or it doesn’t latch properly or it doesn’t have the right gasketing or whatever the problem might have been. For example, I know of one fire at least where the door was rubbing on the carpet or the flooring and so it wouldn’t close all the way unless you manually closed it. So I think that’s really a great opportunity. The multifamily buildings

not only for business, but also just to improve the safety of the occupants. can think of the hundreds of multifamily inspections I’ve done in the inner city of Chicago, where the hallway and the stairs are all wide open. There’s no compartmentalization and it’s got how old core doors to the apartments and sure there’s a lock, but there’s not much meat there. So for

for all those inspectors that might be watching that, this is an opportunity for us to educate our clients. Maybe they’re in New York or Chicago or LA or Houston or some of these super large communities that might not have as vigorous of compliance inspections, but at least we can do a, be aware comments to our clients could go a long way.

CCPIA (27:32.564)
Yeah, and you know, even in locations where the fire door inspections aren’t being enforced widely, we see them now in healthcare being very vigorously enforced. But for example, if you’re in a jurisdiction where they’re not enforcing them for other types of buildings, it’s still the responsibility of the building owner, the facility manager to make sure their doors are code compliant. The inspections are really just a tool.

to make sure that the doors are code compliant. If they’re not and something happens, everybody has liability to worry about. And so even if the fire marshal isn’t coming in to look at that report, I just think it’s the responsibility of the building owners and the property managers to make sure that they’re protecting the building occupants in their buildings and they’re protecting themselves from liability. And you know, the inspections are…

a great tool for that. I don’t know if you saw during your research on my website, I have a laminated card that lists all the criteria for fire door inspections and some other information. So those can be really good to help educate clients and building owners, et cetera. So those are available on the fire door page of iDig Hardware. And there’s videos and other, lots of other information. I know you sell door gapping tools, you sell all those things. So I think it’s fabulous. And I think at that note,

Boy, thank you so much for spending a little bit of time with me today. I think fire doors are a critical element to any building safety. And I for 40 years, you’ve been carrying, I don’t want to say carrying the torch, but you’ve been carrying the banner for public safety. And thank you. Well, thanks. Thanks for having me. And I’m really, I’m always happy to spread the word a bit. Yep.

Be safe and thank you again for spending time with the Certified Commercial Property Inspectors Association. Of course, anytime. Thank you.