Fire Doors
Fire door inspection checklist
A printable field checklist for recording what you find at a fire doorset — free, no form, no email address. Every line in it comes from the FRS Technical Library, where each answer is reviewed and dated by a named person.
Overview
Most fire door checklists on the internet are a list of things to look at. That is the easy half. The hard half is knowing what a tick actually proves, and what to write down when you cannot tick anything at all — because that is the part a building surveyor, an insurer or a solicitor will read.
This one is built the other way round. It prompts you through the doorset in the order a real inspection runs, it tells you where to stop rather than push on, and it ends with a record sheet whose columns are the fields a usable record has to contain. If a row has a blank in it, the record is not finished.
The two checks that decide whether the inspection can happen
They both come before anybody touches a door, and getting them the wrong way round is the most common reason an inspection has to be repeated.
The construction era. Passive fire materials installed before about 1990 can contain asbestos, and fire doors of that era are squarely in scope. Establish the age and check the asbestos register first. If the status of a door is unresolved, it is photographed in place and recorded as a finding — not drilled, cut, sampled or scraped to find out.
The approval history. This is the one almost everybody skips. An existing building is not measured against the current National Construction Code. It is measured against the edition it was approved to — and without knowing which edition that is, an inspection can record what is there and what condition it is in, but it cannot reach a compliance conclusion, because the standard to compare against has not been established.
Both of these are in section 01 of the checklist for that reason. They are not paperwork to be got out of the way; they are what makes the rest of the day worth doing.
What a tick proves, and what it does not
A completed checklist is a record of what was observed. It is not a certificate, and a page of ticks is not a statement that a door complies.
A compliance conclusion needs three things the checklist cannot supply on its own: the doorset identified, the evidence behind it reviewed, and the standard that applies to that building established. Any one of those missing and the honest output is a description of the condition plus a plain statement of what evidence is missing.
That is not a weaker result. "The tag is illegible, the schedule does not match what is installed, and no system evidence has been located" tells a building owner exactly what to chase. "Non-compliant" tells them nothing they can act on.
Why this matters more in Western Australia than people think
Regulation 48A of the Building Regulations 2012 puts a standing duty on the owner of an existing Class 2 to Class 9 building: the building's safety measures have to remain capable of performing to the standard in the relevant building standards for each part of it. Failing that duty carries a penalty of a fine of $5,000.
The regulation defines “safety measures” to include building fire integrity — passive fire protection, named in Western Australian law, in the same defined list as means of egress and automatic fire detection. Fire doors sit inside that.
And “relevant building standards” is defined as the edition of the Building Code named in the certificate of design compliance for the most recent building permit for that part — not the newest edition published. A 1998 building is measured against 1998. A wing altered under a 2019 permit is measured against 2019. One building can carry several editions across its parts, which is why a defect register written against a single assumed edition will be wrong somewhere.
General information about the regulatory framework, not legal advice. Your building surveyor is the right person to confirm what applies to your building.
Who this is for
It is written for the person holding the clipboard
- Facility and asset managers walking their own building before booking work, so the enquiry that follows is specific.
- Builders and site managers checking doors ahead of a handover inspection rather than during one.
- Strata and property managers who need to know what condition the doors are in before the next maintenance cycle is priced.
- Anyone who has been handed a defect report and wants to understand what was actually looked at.
Free download
Fire door inspection — field checklist
Print it, put it on a clipboard, and photocopy the last page once for every run of doors. No form to fill in and no email address required.
Download the checklistWritten against AS 1905.1, AS 1530.4 and AS 1851, and against the Building Regulations 2012 (WA). Reviewed by Scott Cunningham, our Compliance Manager. If the printout is ever older than the website, the website is right.
What is in it
- 55 checks across ten sections — from what to establish before you touch anything, through identification, leaf and frame, gaps, hardware, seals, modifications and operation.
- Four “stop” rules — the points where carrying on produces a record that is worse than no record.
- What to record for every door, whatever you found.
- When to stop and escalate — six conditions where continuing wastes the visit.
- A door record sheet with eleven rows, columned to match the record fields exactly.
Questions
Before you ask
- Do I have to give you my email address to get it?
- No. There is no form. The link downloads the PDF.
- Can I use it in my own building, or give it to my team?
- Yes. Print it, copy it, hand it around. It has our phone number on the bottom of it, which is the only thing we want out of it.
- Does filling this in mean our doors are compliant?
- No, and the checklist says so on the front. It records what was observed. A compliance conclusion needs the doorset identified, the evidence behind it reviewed, and the edition of the Building Code the building was approved against established.
- Is this a substitute for an inspection by a qualified person?
- No. It is a prompt sheet. It will make your own walk-through more useful and your enquiry more specific, and it will show you quickly which doors need somebody who does this for a living.
- How often is it updated?
- It is rebuilt from the Technical Library articles behind it, so it changes when they do. The date on the bottom is the date the oldest source answer was last reviewed — not the date it was printed.
Walked the building and found more than you expected?
Send us what you recorded — the sheet, the photographs, whatever you have. We will tell you what can be answered from it, what needs a site visit, and what is going to need records chased before anybody can conclude anything.