A fire door inspection captures the condition of a door on a single day. The rest of the year, that door is in use, and use is what wears it out, knocks it about and tempts people to defeat it. A door that passed cleanly in January can be non-compliant by March without anyone scheduling a thing.
That gap between formal inspections is where compliance is quietly kept or lost. This article is about the everyday care that closes it: the faults that creep in, how to catch them early, and where the line sits between routine upkeep and a defect that needs proper remedial work.
It helps to be clear about what an inspection does and does not do. A formal inspection is a point-in-time assessment by a competent person. It does not freeze the door in that condition. Our article on the difference between a check and an inspection draws out the distinction, and inspection frequency explains how often the formal assessments should happen.
The interval between them is the exposure. The more a door is used and the harsher its environment, the more can change in that window, which is why interim awareness counts most exactly where doors are busiest.
Most between-inspection failures come from a short list of culprits:
None of these needs an inspector to notice. They need someone who knows what a healthy fire door looks like, looking at the right moment.
The cheapest fire door monitoring you have is the people who pass through the doors every day. Caretakers, cleaners, site staff and, in residential settings, residents themselves are far more likely to notice a closer that has stopped working than any quarterly visit will be.
The key is that they know what to report and who to tell. In multi-occupied residential buildings this is a legal duty in its own right, covered in our article on the Regulation 10 resident information duty. In any setting, a simple, well-publicised route for reporting a fault turns everyday users into an early-warning network.
Between formal inspections, brief informal walk-rounds catch the obvious. Is the door closing fully and latching? Is it propped? Is there visible damage, or are the seals intact and unpainted? Is the signage there? A competent person can run that eye over a run of doors quickly.
These walk-rounds are a supplement, not a substitute. They do not replace the formal inspection by a competent person, and they should not be recorded as if they did. Their value is speed: catching the propped door or failed closer weeks before the next scheduled assessment would.
Some things found on a walk-round are quick fixes, such as removing a wedge or refitting a sign. Others are defects that need proper remedial work, logged, prioritised and tracked to completion. Our guides on common defects and how to prioritise them and whether to repair or replace help draw that line. The principle is simple: if the fault affects fire or smoke performance and cannot be corrected on the spot, it goes into the remedial process, not back into the to-do pile.
DoorTRACE gives everyday users a way to report a fault against a specific door in seconds, and gives the responsible person a live view of what has been raised and what is outstanding. Interim issues and formal inspection findings live in the same record, tracked through to verified repair, so nothing slips through the gap between visits. To see how it keeps compliance steady between inspections, see the platform or get in touch.
The amendments to Approved Document B come into force today: more than one common stair in new blocks of flats with a storey 18m or more, evacuation shafts to support evacuation lifts, and new escape guidance. What changes, who it touches, and the fire door angle.
Only inspections are charged on Pay-As-You-Go from now on. The form that closes out remedial work joins registrations and reports on the free list, so the cost of a door for the year is known before it starts.
An open warehouse floor resists traditional compartmentation, so its fire doors concentrate around the edges and take the hardest knocks in any sector. Where the doors are, the fork-lift problem, and a check regime for a hard-wearing site.