From Derek Smith, Door and Shutter Manufacturers' Association
The opening sentence of your article on fire tests for doors appears to condemn steel fire doors (24 August, p 6). The sentence is inaccurate and is potentially damaging to the metal door industry.
The test door referred to in the article comprises steel sheets around a timber core and is therefore not a standard steel door, but an unfamiliar hybrid. Steel doors normally have two formed steel trays which totally enclose a core of honeycomb or insulation material – not timber.
The fire resistance test to which this hybrid product was subjected was based on a newly developed time-temperature curve intended to represent the specific – and restricted – case of hotel bedroom doors only. Even so, the curve displayed by Daniel Joyeux is not widely accepted, and British laboratories doubt that it is representative of real hotel fire conditions.
Your report says that only parts of doors are tested. This is not correct as hotel doors, like all others, are tested complete in their supporting frames with hardware fitted.
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Peter Bressington says in the article that he supports timber doors, but has not appreciated that the door which failed the test was a timber door with metal sheeting.
The whole basis of this article appears to be flawed. Metal doors give much better protection than timber doors. They do not burn, but expand into their frames so acting as a fire barrier. Also, they do not cause flashback when subjected to a firefighter’s hose, as timber doors can.
Tamworth, Staffordshire, UK
