Fire Door Drop Testing

CHALLENGE:  A global big box retail chain was looking for a service company to create a program to maintain their thousands of coiling fire doors per the National Fire Protection Association's (NFPA) guidelines.  The Standard for fire doors, NFPA 80, addresses general requirements and provisions for the care and maintenance of fire doors.  It requires an annual inspection and drop test on all fire doors to demonstrate proper operation, full closure and proper reset.  Our customer understood the importance of their fire doors working properly to mitigate risk of injury or loss of life in the case of a fire in one of their stores.

Cornell Storefront Systems was tasked with developing a program that would ensure that each of our customer's 3,500+ coiling fire doors was inspected and tested every year.  

ACTION:  During the first year of testing, we found many of our customer's coiling doors were inoperable due to damage or other circumstances.  These inoperable doors created a huge liability that was now reduced significantly.  We noticed that a lot of the issues with the inoperable doors resulted from dented hoods caused by impacts from forklifts.  We knew that after replacing the hood the fire door would work again, but we wanted to take a more proactive approach to ensure these hoods weren't impacted again.  We created a solution called the Rolling Door Protector (RDP) which is designed to take the force of an impact to protect the hood and allow the door to remain operable.

RESULT:  Our customer began to see the value of the program once we showed them how many fire doors they had that were not working properly and how we significantly reduced their liability.  In addition, the development of the Rolling Door Protector that specifically addressed an issue that was causing a liability for them reinforced their decision to renew this program year after year.