Fire door inspection in Bushey
Converted houses, small blocks and shared lets, door by door.
Get a priceBushey runs on from Watford without a gap, so most of what we say about Watford applies here too.
What changes is the council and the building stock. Bushey sits in Hertsmere, not in Watford borough. Hertsmere Borough Council is the housing authority, and Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service is the one that enforces fire safety.
The house with three front doors
The building we are most likely to be asked about in a place like this is a big house with a flat on each floor.
Picture the hall. Three front doors off it, each a different age. Down below, the original front door of the house. Above, whatever each owner or landlord thought was good enough.
The question is whether any of the three can hold back a fire for long enough. Often nobody knows, because nobody has looked at the edge of the door or measured the gaps.
What we do first
We look at the edge of each flat door for a label or plug. Then we put the gauge on the top, the sides and the bottom.
The gap under a door is the one that goes wrong most in converted houses. A new carpet or a laminate floor goes down, and the bottom of the door is planed to clear it. Now the gap is too big.
Then the closer. Many flat doors in houses have none. Some have one that was fitted and later removed, and the holes are still in the frame.
What the gauge tells us on a house door
A well-hung door has an even gap down the hinge side and the closing side. When one side is tight and the other is open, the door has dropped on its hinges, and the top corner is rubbing or leaving a hole.
We run the gauge at the top, the middle and the bottom of each side. A door can pass at the middle and fail at the corner.
Hinges get a look too. A fire door normally has at least three, made of steel, with every screw in place. Older houses can have two brass hinges, sometimes with screws missing.
Small blocks
Newer blocks of a few flats are a different job. The doors are usually certified, and the faults are about how they were fitted and what has happened since.
Cables are a common one. A broadband installer or a door entry company has drilled through a frame, and nobody filled the hole.
Under 11 metres, the three-month rule in the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 does not apply. The doors still have to be kept working. How often you check them is for your fire risk assessment to say.
Shared lets
For shared houses and bedsits, see our page on care and supported living for the kind of faults that come up in ordinary houses used by several people. The same things happen in a letting.
If the house needs an HMO licence, the licence conditions will set out what the council wants from the doors.
Getting to Bushey
It is about 45 minutes from our base in Luton. The M1 gets us most of the way.
We cover Bushey village, Bushey Heath and Bushey Hall, and we pair visits with nearby ones in Watford where we can.
Your own fire risk assessment will say which doors it lists. Send it with your enquiry if you have it, and we will build the inspection round it.
Send the postcode and a rough door count. You get a price back the same day.
Get a price