The standards
Four documents get quoted at building occupiers and they do different things. Knowing which is which saves a lot of argument.
Call 0485 032 510Get the inspection arranged
Tell us the building and roughly how many doors, and we will arrange the inspection.
Fire Doors Brisbane — firedoorsbrisbane.com.au — arranges these inspections with a QBCC-licensed contractor across Brisbane, Ipswich, Logan, Redlands and the Gold Coast.
| Building Fire Safety Regulation 2008 (Qld) | The Queensland law. It creates the duty, puts it on the occupier, and requires the yearly Occupier's Statement (Form 74) to the Commissioner of the Queensland Fire Department. This is the one that makes it compulsory. |
|---|---|
| AS 1851-2012 | The maintenance standard. It sets out what routine servicing and the annual inspection of a fire or smoke door actually consist of, and what has to be recorded. This is the one the inspection is carried out to. |
| Queensland Development Code MP 6.1 | Sets the intervals — how often prescribed installations are inspected and tested in Queensland. |
| AS 1905.1 | The product standard for fire-resistant door sets. It governs how a door is made, rated and installed, not how it is maintained. This is the one a replacement door has to satisfy. |
If someone quotes you a standard and you are not sure which of these they mean, ask. The difference between the product standard and the maintenance standard is the difference between a door that was compliant when installed and a door that is compliant now.
AS 1905.1 is the Australian Standard for fire-resistant doorsets. It deals with the door as a complete set: the leaf, the frame, the seals, the hinges, the closer and the latch, made and installed together.
A doorset earns its rating in a fire test to AS 1530.4. The standard then fixes what can and cannot be varied from the tested set, how the set is marked, and how it has to be installed so it performs the way it did in the test.
That is why a door cannot be judged on its own. A rated leaf in an unrated frame, or with the wrong hinges, is not an AS 1905.1 doorset.
A fire door's rating is written as a fire resistance level of three numbers, in minutes: structural adequacy, integrity and insulation. A door marked –/60/30 holds back flame for sixty minutes and limits the heat on the far side for thirty. The dash means structural adequacy does not apply to a door.
The level a door needs comes from the building's approval, not from the door. A replacement has to match what the wall it sits in was approved with.
A compliant doorset is permanently marked, usually with a metal tag on the hinge edge of the leaf and another on the frame. The marking identifies the maker and the rating.
If that marking has been painted over, cut off or lost, the door cannot easily be shown to be a rated door. That turns up at inspection as a defect, and it is one of the most common ones in older Brisbane buildings. Our tagging page explains the difference between that label and the inspection tag.
Your annual inspection is done to AS 1851-2012, the maintenance standard. AS 1905.1 governs how the door was built and installed. The inspector checks that the door is still in the configuration AS 1905.1 tested it in, but the inspection itself is an AS 1851 activity.
So a contractor who says the door “fails AS 1905.1” usually means one of two things: it was never a compliant set, or something has been changed since. Ask which, because the fix is different.
A smoke door is built to the Building Code's smoke door requirements, not tested as a fire-resistant doorset. It still has to self-close and seal, and it is still inspected every year. The smoke doors page sets out the difference.
