Frequently asked questions

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 the Responsible Person for a non-domestic or multi-occupied building must ensure the general fire precautions are adequate and maintained in efficient working order — which includes fire doors. For multi-occupied residential buildings, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 add specific, dated duties: quarterly checks of communal fire doors and annual checks of flat entrance doors in buildings over 11 metres, and information to residents about fire doors in all such buildings. The duty is on the Responsible Person, not on the contractor — but the evidence you hold is what demonstrates you have discharged it.

The number is the fire resistance in minutes that the doorset achieved in test — 30 or 60 minutes of integrity. The S suffix means the doorset also has smoke control, achieved with cold smoke seals, and is required where the door protects an escape route. So an FD30S is a 30-minute fire door with smoke sealing. Crucially the rating belongs to the whole doorset as tested — leaf, frame, seals, glazing and ironmongery — not to the leaf alone. Fitting a rated leaf into an unrated frame does not produce a rated doorset.

A great many can be repaired. Damaged or missing intumescent and smoke seals, failed or wrongly specified ironmongery, closers out of adjustment, gaps outside tolerance, minor leaf damage and missing signage are all commonly repairable to a compliant condition. What matters is that the repair is carried out within a certification scheme that covers it — BM TRADA Q-Mark scheme 058 is the scheme specifically for fire door maintenance and repair — using components compatible with that doorset's certification, by someone assessed as competent. A repair outside those conditions can quietly invalidate the door. We work repair-first and tell you in writing when replacement is genuinely the only compliant answer.

Nothing automatically. A failed doorset is recorded with photographs of every defect, banded by severity, and given a costed remedial or replacement line. You then decide the programme. What a survey changes is that you now know, and you have to manage what you know — which is why we band findings by risk rather than presenting a flat list, so that the doors on escape routes get dealt with before the cosmetic ones.

Yes — fire-rated drylining, partitions, shaft walls, ceilings and structural encasement to the tested system details, typically Promat, Siniat and British Gypsum. One honest caveat: our BM TRADA Q-Mark 05B certification covers fire stopping installation, so the seals, head-of-wall joints and penetrations in those walls are certified work, but the drylining itself is installed to tested system detail outside the Q-Mark scheme scope. We always tell clients which elements are third-party certified and which are not.

It depends on the lease and on who has control. The Fire Safety Order places duties on the person who has control of the premises to the extent of that control, which in a leased building often means the landlord is responsible for common parts and structure and the tenant for the demise. In practice both parties frequently hold a duty over the same door. The practical answer is to establish it in writing and then evidence whichever part is yours — disputes about responsibility are not a defence for either side.

Fire stopping is the sealing of every hole made through a fire-resisting wall or floor — service penetrations, linear joints between elements, cavity barriers in voids, and openings left blank for future use. Compartmentation divides a building into fire-resisting boxes; fire stopping is what keeps those boxes intact where services pass through them. It matters because the fire strategy for your building, including the escape times and any stay-put policy, assumes the compartment lines hold. An unsealed cable penetration is a hole in that assumption, and it is invisible above a ceiling.

It is a physical inspection of the compartment lines in your building — walls, floors, risers and voids — recording every point at which the line is breached. You need one if your fire risk assessment has recommended it (a Type 3 or Type 4 assessment usually will), if the building has been refurbished or re-serviced since it was built, or if you cannot currently produce evidence about the condition of your compartmentation. It is not a fire risk assessment; it gives the fire risk assessor the physical evidence about the structure that a visual assessment cannot obtain.

In terraces, semis, converted houses and residential blocks, the wall between one dwelling and the next is a compartment wall and must continue up through the roof void to the underside of the roof covering. Very often it does not — it was never built that high, or it was breached by cables, pipes, extract ducts or a later loft conversion. Loft compartmentation is the work of restoring that line: closing the void, sealing every crossing service and fitting cavity barriers appropriate to the roof construction. It is one of the most common serious defects in British residential stock.

Yes, and we would encourage it. The same penetration frequently has to stop fire, sound and air. Sealing it three times by three trades on three visits is how buildings end up with none of the three working, because each trade disturbs the last one's seal. We treat the aperture as a single asset with several defined performances and seal it once. The fire element is certified under scheme 05B; the acoustic and air elements are not certified work and we do not present them as such.

We install to the tested system appropriate to the substrate, the service and the aperture in front of us, which means we are not tied to one manufacturer. Across fire stopping and fire-rated construction that typically includes the major tested ranges — the right choice is dictated by the test evidence for that specific detail, not by a supply agreement. We record the system and its classification against every asset, so you can always trace what was installed back to the evidence it relies on.

Every doorset is inspected as a complete assembly against BS 8214 and the FDIS methodology — leaf, frame, intumescent and smoke seals, glazing and beads, hinges, closer, latch and ironmongery, signage, gaps and threshold. Each doorset is photographed, given a unique QR tag fixed to the frame, and recorded in Onetrace against its location on the plan. Defects are classified, banded by severity and costed. You end up with a register you can search, not a PDF you have to read.

As a working figure, a surveyor covers roughly twenty doorsets a day, though it varies considerably with access. Doors in occupied offices, wards, classrooms and hotel bedrooms are slower than doors in a corridor, and a building where every door needs a key from a different person is slower again. We give a programme with the quotation and we hold to it.

A fire door survey assesses doorsets as assemblies. A compartmentation survey assesses the walls, floors, risers and voids — the fire stopping, cavity barriers and the continuity of the compartment line itself. Most buildings need both. Running them together on one mobilisation is usually cheaper than commissioning them separately, and it produces one register rather than two.

If your fire risk assessment has recommended one, or if the ceilings are sealed so the compartment lines cannot be seen, then yes. If much of the building is accessible above tile ceilings and through open risers, a non-intrusive survey with targeted opening-up may reach the same confidence for less. We recommend a representative sampling strategy rather than blanket opening-up, expanded if the sample shows systemic problems.

No, and we will not pretend otherwise. A fire risk assessment is a different discipline covering the whole picture of risk in a building — management, means of escape, detection, occupancy and more. We carry out the physical surveys of fire doors and compartmentation that a fire risk assessor needs evidence from, and we carry out the certified works that follow. If you need a fire risk assessment, we are happy to point you towards competent assessors; keeping the assessment and the works with separate parties is better practice anyway.

We can survey the doorsets, yes — they exist whether or not there is a drawing. Compartmentation is different: without a defined compartment line, a survey is an inspection of holes rather than an assessment of compliance. Where the drawings do not exist we say so up front and can produce measured compartmentation drawings as a first stage, which is the starting point of our Compliance Pathway.

Q-Mark is a third-party product and installer certification scheme run by BM TRADA. Being certified means an external body has audited our procedures, our people, our sites and our records against the scheme requirements, and continues to audit them — it is not a one-off qualification or a membership you pay for. That is the difference between third-party certification and self-declaration. Arctic Fire holds three schemes on certificate 4515: 052 fire door installation, 058 fire door maintenance, and 05B fire stopping installation.

Companies are certified; certification bodies are accredited. Arctic Fire is certified by BM TRADA. BM TRADA is accredited by UKAS under accreditation number 0012. Anyone describing themselves as ‘UKAS accredited’ for fire door installation is describing something that cannot be true, and it is a useful test of whether a contractor understands their own certification.

Every Q-Mark scheme requires a named Approved Person who is accountable for the technical content of the work. Ours are Stephen Giles DipFD, Approved Person for schemes 052 and 058, and David Nemes, Approved Person for scheme 05B covering installation groups A to D. Both are here every day and both are named on our certificate — you can verify it in the BM TRADA certified companies directory.

No, and nobody honest can. Certification attaches to the installation carried out under the scheme by the certified installer, with the records made at the time. We can survey and assess existing work and tell you what condition it is in and whether it meets the standard — and we can remediate it and certify our own remedial work — but we cannot retrospectively certify an installation we did not carry out.

Where the setting requires it, yes — and it is arranged before mobilisation rather than at the gate. We work airside at Heathrow under full permit control with security-cleared operatives, on secure government estates, and in education settings where DBS checks and safeguarding supervision apply. We confirm in writing which clearances are in place for the people who will actually attend your site.

It is most of what we do. Live airport terminals under airside permit control, a Grade II* listed public museum, and occupied commercial and education buildings. Works are broken into packages that can be started, completed and fully reinstated inside the window available, so nothing is left open when the building reopens.

Yes to all three, and it is planned that way from the outset rather than added later. Out-of-hours and night working, between-event windows in venues, engineering possessions on the railway, and appointment-based access in occupied homes are all normal for us. Airside work at Heathrow runs under full permit control with cleared operatives.

For every asset: photographs taken at the time, the system or doorset installed with its specification and tested classification, the scheme the work was carried out under, the date, and the location plotted on the plan. It is held in Onetrace as a live register rather than issued as a static PDF, so it stays current as future work is done. Product datasheets and classification reports are collected in one pack.

Onetrace is the digital asset management platform we record into. Every doorset and every seal becomes an asset with a QR tag on it; scanning the tag brings up that asset's full history. Yes, you get access — the register is yours. That matters because it means your next fire risk assessment, your next contractor and your own FM team all start from the existing record instead of re-surveying from scratch.

We hold public liability and employer's liability insurance appropriate to the work we undertake, and we are happy to provide current certificates and the cover levels on request — most clients ask for them at pre-qualification and we would rather send the actual certificate than publish a figure that changes at renewal.

It is priced against the number of doorsets and the access conditions, not by the defect — so the price does not go up because we found problems, which is an incentive structure nobody should accept. Tell us roughly how many doorsets there are, the building type and where it is, and we will give you a fixed price against a defined scope. Fixed-price surveys can also be booked directly through our booking service at firesurvey.co.uk.

It depends on floor area, construction type, how much is accessible without opening up, and whether compartmentation drawings exist or need producing first. Those variables move the number a great deal, which is why we price after a short conversation about the building rather than publishing a rate. The price we give is fixed against the scope.

If a fire door has failed, a compartment has been breached, or you have a handover deadline, call 020 8769 8869 and say it is urgent. We keep capacity for short-notice work and can usually get a surveyor or an operative out within days rather than weeks. Send photographs if you have them — it often lets us arrive with the right components rather than needing a second visit.

Yes. For residential blocks we run Regulation 10 quarterly and annual check programmes against an established register, so the record is continuous and dated. For commercial and healthcare estates we run planned inspection and maintenance cycles under Q-Mark scheme 058. The value of a contract rather than ad-hoc visits is that the asset history is unbroken, which is exactly what an auditor looks for.

We are based at Heathrow — 450 Bath Road, West Drayton — and the majority of our work is across London, the Thames Valley and the M4 corridor. We work UK-wide for estate programmes and for clients who want one contractor across multiple sites; recent work includes Kensington.