Attic conversion fire doors

[dystylam]

Hi all, we are having an attic conversion and obviously we need to stick in fire doors in all rooms off the stairwell now.

However the builder hasn't put in door frames that allow for the intumescent strip.

Do any of you have an attic conversion and not have intumescent strips in the fire door frames? I have searched building regs documents and I can see that fire doors are mandatory but I cannot find anything that refers to the intumescent strips on a single dwelling

You may not need fire doors at all, aside from the loft room itself. It depends who signs off your building control. Our loft conversion company (booked in for later this year) uses a private building control company that will allow standard doors as long as there are mains-powered smoke alarms in all habitable rooms (eg living room, kitchen, bedrooms). The company rep said the law isn’t explicit and while most councils will insist on fire doors, there is room for interpretation. His view is that smoke alarms are actually safer - if a fire has been burning for the 30+ minutes it takes to breach the room’s fire door and finally trigger the nearest smoke alarm to wake you up, that’s a very well-established fire. Versus a mains-powered alarm, especially an interlinked one, which would sound all the alarms in the house simultaneously.

You need wired fire alarms as well as fire doors
BBuilding regulations state that you need to create a safe corridor from the loft to the outside of the building and this requires changing all the existing doors on rooms that are on the escape route. The reason for fitting fire doors is to provide an escape corridor between the loft and the external door, ensuring that if there was a fire anywhere in the house, those in the loft conversion could make a safe exit

Yep we have the alarms in the hallway, just wondering about the fire door strips in frame.