Fire Door Upgrade

Fire door upgrade and its importance in fire protection…

Fire protection within old & historical buildings is vitally important for not only life safety but also to maintain the wealth of Victorian & Georgian architecture we have within our country, so in this series of blogs I will be briefly introducing you to a series of different products that we use to fire protect historically important and also residential properties.

Today we will look at the fire door upgrade kit which is used in conjunction with other products to bring a Victorian & Georgian panelled door up to FD20 or FD30 standard. The DK1 fire door upgrade kit consists of the following items:

• Adhesion primer.
• White Intumescent paint.
• Under coat.
• Heat resistant adhesive.
• Intumescent membrane.

Minimum requirement for the DK1 fire door upgrade kit:

• Thickness of the rails to be greater than 32mm.
• Thickness of the panels to be greater than 6mm.
• Door construction to be from solid timber with mortise and tenon joints.
• To install the DK1 fire door upgrade kit you will need the following tools, sugar soap, sandpaper, paint brushes a ruler or straight edge and a pair of scissors.

Then you will need to do the following:

• Clean down the door using the sugar soap.
• Sand down the paint to produce a matt finish.
• Measure the size of the panels and cut the Intumescent membrane to size.
• Glue the Intumescent membrane to the panels using the heat resistant adhesive with the white card showing.
• Apply 1 coat of the primer to the whole door except the panels and allow to dry
• Apply 2 coats of the Intumescent paint to the whole door allowing each coat to dry.
• Apply 1 coat of undercoat to the whole door including the panels.
• Once finished you will have a completely MATT white door ready for your own topcoat to be installed to give you your desired colour and finish.

One of the most common questions we have from our customers is: “How does the Intumescent paint and membrane work in a fire?” The answer to this questions is; “The products intumesce/expand to create a carbon barrier to reduce the amount of heat and fire passing through to the timber thus protecting it for a desired period of time.” The above statement is better demonstrated in the video below, where we set alight some timber which has been treated with an intumescent paint.

For more information on fire door upgrades, give our friendly team a call on 01752 690997. You can also click here to read the next article in this series, which is about intumescent seals for fire doors.