Fire And Residential Doors: 3 FAQs

You need to proactively mitigate the fire risk within your residential premises as much as possible. Incorporating fire-rated building materials in your house design during the construction phase is perhaps the best way to do this. If your house is built already, you might want to invest in a fire extinguisher. This article answers three questions about fire and residential doors.

Prospective new homeowners should find this information useful.

How Does The Choice Of Material Affect The Fire Risk?

One word: flammability. What are your doors made of? This is the first question you should ask yourself when evaluating how much of a fire risk your doors will be.

In many cases, residential doors are made of wood or steel. Wood is a highly flammable material, while steel is not. This means that doors made of wood are more likely to catch fire and to encourage its spread to other parts of the house during an outbreak. Thus, wooden doors are more of a fire hazard than doors made of steel.

Steel has a higher combustion temperature, which isn't likely to be reached during a residential fire.

What Is a Fire-Rated Door?

During the fabrication of doors, manufacturers are expected to meet various quality standards to ensure that their products are safe to use and that the specifications claimed by the manufacturer are met.

Fire rating is a measure of how long the door material will take before it catches fire in the event of exposure during an outbreak. This rating is often given in terms of hours, and it often falls between ¾ of an hour and 3 hours.

A higher rating means that it will take longer for a door to give when exposed to a raging flame.

This rating is dependent on various factors, notably the fire rating of the walls to which the door is attached. Normally, doors should have a rating that's a fraction (approximately 75%) of the fire rating for its adjacent walls.

How Can One Reduce The Fire Risk Associated With Wooden Doors?

The aesthetic appeal of a wooden door might be hard to sacrifice, even with flammability in mind. Settling for doors with the highest fire rating is one way to reduce the mentioned risk.

Installing fire-rated metal frames around the wooden door will also help to reduce the fire risk. In the event of fire, the metal frame acts as a barrier between the fire and the wooden portion of the door. This increases the time it takes for the door to catch fire. 

For more information, contact a company that sells fire doors.