Get ion the know about fire safety

Understanding flame retardants and wood products

Fresh from Fire Door Safety Week, now is the perfect time to make sure your branch staff understand the key terminology when selling fire doors and their ancillary products. Fire Door Safety Week is a national campaign run by the British Woodworking Council that Timber Development UK is proud to support. It aims to educate and engage the entire industry on the correct specification, installation and maintenance of fire doors.

Merchants play a key role in promoting fire safety for wood products, especially when it comes to fire doors, which make a vital difference in the event of a fire – but only when they are specified, fitted and maintained correctly. Equipping your staff with the essential facts about fire doors is the first step towards protecting both your customers and your reputation.

Understand the terminology

Most fire doors are rated either FD30 or FD60, giving either 30- or 60- minutes’ resistance against the spread of fire when installed in a suitable structure. In more specialist products this may be extended to 120 or 240 minutes.

Fire doors must be certified to confirm their resistance to fire performance. This certification will include specifically identified Ironmongery and door frames. These additional items will be automatically included where the product is sold as a fire door set.

However, where fire doors are sold separately it is important that all staff and customers are fully aware of which ironmongery and door frames must be used with which specific fire door in order to achieve its certified fire resistance. This means that any merchant staff who are selling such products will need additional training from your fire door supplier.

It also means that all necessary documentation to support each fire door within the range sold is easily available and always provided as part of the sales package.

A number of TDUK resources can give you more information about fire safety and why the terminology is so important. You can check out our Merchant Guide to Selling Timber to learn more, or visit timberfiresafety.org and find everything your customers need to know to create fire-safe timber buildings.