Fire door seal replacement in Slough
Painted, torn, missing or the wrong size for the gap.
Get a priceOpen your fire door and look at the edge of the leaf and at the frame. A strip runs up both sides and across the top, sometimes with a little brush or a rubber fin along it. That is the seal, and for such a cheap part it does a serious job.
Two jobs in one strip
When it gets hot the intumescent part expands, and that closes the gap between door and frame.
The brush or fin stops cold smoke getting past before the fire is anywhere near. People caught in a fire are far more likely to be hurt by smoke than by flames, so that part really does matter.
Some doors have the two combined. Others have them separately.
How they fail
Decorators are the main cause. Two coats of gloss and the brush goes solid.
Next, age. Seals get brittle and drop out in sections, usually near the hinges where they take the most rubbing.
Then there are the ones that were never there. A door was bought as a fire door, hung by someone who did not know about the strips, and has sat there for twenty years without any.
And sometimes they are simply the wrong size. A strip made for a 3mm gap fitted on a door with an 8mm gap will not do much.
How we replace them
The job goes like this.
1. The old seal is pulled out of the groove. 2. The groove is cleaned of paint and dust. 3. The new strip is cut to length and mitred at the corners. 4. It goes in with no gaps along the run.
The strip has to suit the door. A 30-minute door can take a different one from a 60-minute door. Double doors and glazed doors have their own rules.
It is usually one of the cheaper repairs on a door. On a job at a block of flats in Stevenage, smoke seals were a large part of what we were asked to fix.
If the gaps are wrong too, they get sorted first. A new strip in a gap that is about to change is wasted.
After the job
Ask your decorator not to paint the seals. If the frames are going to be painted, tell us when you book and we will fit the seals last.
Questions we get asked
Can seals go on any fire door?
If it is a real fire door in reasonable shape, yes. If there is no evidence that it is a fire door at all, new seals will not turn it into one.
Do you do double doors?
Yes. The meeting edge between the two leaves needs its own seals, and that is the part most often missed.
Send it over with the postcode and we will price it per door the same day.
Get a price