A fire door fitted with IoT sensors that tests itself could be the answer to the growing issue of fire door inspections.
Landlords’ mandatory compliance inspection regimes for fire doors are often incomplete through lack of access to homes, increasing risks to those residents and the wider building community if fire doors are found to be non-compliant.
In response to this, fire safety specialist Harmony Fire has launched the Auro Door. It’s a 30-minute rated (FD30) fire door, manufactured in the UK, that provides always-on compliance monitoring using IoT sensors.
Auro Door provides landlords with immediate validation on installation, then performance against strict measurement tolerances is tracked in real-time for the lifetime of the door. The sensors track gap, swing, slam, drop, vandalism and other metrics to determine if any non-compliance events have taken place.
As well as compliance notifications, Auro Door provides asset managers with predictive maintenance information to ensure wearing components, for instance door closers, can be replaced in line with specifications and ahead of more costly failure, which can also compromise door integrity.
The system can connect to existing FM systems via APIs and the data is end-to-end encrypted. The dashboard is customisable.
Front-line defence
The IoT sensors are described as discreet. Harmony notes that the system “tracks the status and activity of doors, not people”. The sensors should have a five-year battery life under normal conditions.
The system cannot be retrofitted, but Harmony is working on this for certain door types in the second phase of development.
Ged Moore, MD at Auro by Harmony, commented: “Registered Providers regularly report that over a third of fire doors cannot be annually inspected due to access issues, with Auro Door providing an innovative solution for safety compliance that is constantly vigilant and self-reporting.
“As a front-line defence against the ingress of smoke and fire into homes, Auro Door is a life-saving barrier, manufactured to the highest-quality standards and incorporating a unique active monitoring system that transforms fire door compliance from annual inspection to self-reporting and diagnosis.”
