Fire doors: inspect the whole doorset, fix the actual defect, keep the evidence with the asset.

• New fire door packages for commercial and industrial projects.
• Inspection of existing fire and smoke doors, item by item.
• Repairs and adjustments where a supported repair path exists.
• Replacement doorsets where repair is not appropriate, or where the evidence cannot support the existing condition.
• Hardware, seals and related components compatible with the doorset evidence.
• Large and specialist doorsets, including sliding and pivot fire doors.
• Exit and egress doors on the path of travel, including the hardware that has to let people out.
• Sole-occupancy unit (SOU) entry doors in apartment and strata buildings.
• Asbestos-containing and suspect fire doors, under our own Class A and Class B licences.
• Asset information, before and after photographs and completion records for every door.

A sole-occupancy unit door — an SOU door — is the front door of an apartment, a hotel room, an office tenancy or an aged-care room, wherever it opens onto a shared corridor or lobby. It is usually a required fire door, and it is the one fire door in the building that somebody is living or working behind.

That is why it is the most-altered door type we see. Self-closers get unhooked or removed because they slam. Security screens, deadlocks, pet doors, smart locks and peepholes get fitted by tradespeople who were never told it was a fire door. It gets painted over, tag and all, every time the corridor is redecorated. Every one of those changes the doorset from the thing that was tested.

For a strata manager the practical position is straightforward: the SOU door is common property in most schemes even though a resident uses it, so the alterations are yours to deal with, and an inspection that lists them is worth more than one that says "fail". We inspect them, record what has been changed on each one, and price the repair or replacement per door rather than per building.

A smoke door and a fire door are not the same thing, and a solid-core door is not automatically either. What a particular door is required to do comes from the project documentation and the building's fire and smoke strategy — not from how the door looks or what it is made of.

That distinction matters most when a door is being repaired, modified or replaced, because the components and evidence that suit one requirement may not suit the other. If you are unsure which you have, send the tag, the schedule reference and photographs of the full opening.

Required fire doors are addressed through the National Construction Code and the Australian Standards it references. AS 1530.4 is the fire test — the furnace test that produces the result a doorset relies on. AS 1905.1 is the standard for the fire doorset itself: how it is constructed, how it is identified and how it is installed into the surrounding construction. Once the building is occupied, routine inspection and maintenance of fire and smoke doors falls to AS 1851. Smoke doors are their own case again, and what a particular door has to do comes from the project documentation rather than from the door.

The practical consequence of AS 1905.1 is that a fire door is one assembly, not a set of parts. The leaf, the frame, the hardware, the seals, any glazing and the fixing into the wall were tested together and are relied on together. Change one of them and the question is no longer whether the new part is good — it is whether the assembly is still the one the evidence describes. That is why a lock fitted by a security contractor, a closer swapped for a quieter one, or a vision panel cut in after handover turns a working door into a door nobody can support.

It is also why identification matters. A doorset that cannot be traced back to its evidence is not automatically wrong, but it cannot be shown to be right, and on site those amount to the same answer. FRS checks the project requirement and the evidence applying to the actual doorset — the one in the opening, in the condition it is in today — rather than treating a standard number as a substitute for the site condition.