There are a lot of difficult decisions you’ll need to make to ensure safety in your business. Among the most consequential of these decisions is what fire doors you choose to go with. It can have a significant effect on the overall safety of your building, influencing both how people escape the premises and how rapidly the fire spreads.
If you’re just beginning to think about the subject, then read on for a guide on where to start with choosing fire-rated emergency exit doors for your business.
Check the relevant regulations
A good place to start with most safety-related measures, fire doors included, is with the applicable regulations. The option you choose won’t just need to be practically effective – it will also need to meet a range of legal standards that have been designed to ensure safety in certain environments.
By starting with the applicable regulations, you can work backwards from the official safety standards, meaning that you don’t have to retroactively check potential doors that you’ve found at a later date. This is an efficient and legally pragmatic approach to take.
Deal with specialist door manufacturers
When looking for fire-rated emergency exit doors, it’s often worth dealing directly with the maker of the doors. You’ll be able to talk to people who actually know what the doors are designed to do, who know about their limitations and important details that wholesalers might not know about.
By working with specialist manufacturers LBS Group, you’ll likely also get higher quality items at a lower price, as there won’t be middlemen who take a cut.
Work with a fire safety risk assessor
While you can definitely do a lot of research on your own, in many cases, it can be beneficial to work with a fully qualified fire safety risk assessor.
They’ll be able to ensure that any solutions that you decide to implement are fully in line with the relevant regulations, making suggestions and spotting issues that the untrained eye might potentially miss.
Pay for proper installation
Once you’ve invested in high-quality fire safety doors and all the associated research, it doesn’t make sense to make relatively minor savings when it comes to installation.
You want to make sure that the tradespeople you pay to put everything together are able to do so in a legally compliant manner, so that everything is safe and up to code. Do your research thoroughly, and make sure that they have plenty of experience working with similar doors and premises.
While it’s easy to start treating it as an annoying regulatory hurdle, it’s important that you take fire safety seriously. It’s a leading cause of serious accidents in the UK, and implementing safety solutions such as fire-rated emergency exit doors can do a lot to mitigate that risk.
By working with a range of professional service providers, you can ensure that you create a safe and legally compliant workplace, protecting yourself from potential issues in the future.