Last year, an expert on corporate blogging and content marketing reviewed iDigHardware, and was very surprised at the amount of engagement shown by the number of comments on many of the posts.  I am so appreciative of the shared insight and collaboration!  So far, there are 20 comments on the Fixed-it Friday post from last week, so I think a follow-up is in order.

Here’s the photo, to refresh your memory:

A few things…

  1. The vision lights are installed very high on the door, and I think one of the commenters may be correct in saying that the bottom of each light is above the 66-inch mark.  We talked about this on a post a while back.  To re-cap, vision lights are required by the accessibility standards to be located with the bottom no more than 43 inches above the floor.  The exception is when you have a light that is mounted above 66 inches AFF – those lights are considered to be for light transmission and not for viewing, so they are not required to be in a location where a person using a wheelchair can see through them.  Normally, this exception applies to doors like the residential entrance doors with glass across the top.  Looking at the lights in the pair above, these lights do seem like they were intentionally mounted this high, but they don’t appear to be for light transmission.  I don’t really think this meets the intent of the accessibility standards.
  2. The doors are swinging opposite the direction of egress, but it’s impossible to know from the photo if this is a problem or not.  Doors are typically required to swing in the direction of egress when they’re serving an occupant load of 50 or more, or a high hazard occupancy.  The occupant load on the pull side of the door may be low, or there may be additional exits that can be reached by going through the doors from the push side.  It is common to see a double-egress pair in a cross-corridor location, but the swing of the doors in the photo may be acceptable (or not).
  3. This is a fire door assembly, and the latching hardware has been removed and the holes filled with what look like wood blocks.  As several people commented, there are sprinkler heads in the corridor, and this may have negated the need for fire doors in this location.  But how would a fire door inspector know that?  In my opinion, if an opening is no longer required to be a fire door assembly, the labels should be removed or there should be some indication that they are not required to be fire doors.  Although it is not a code violation to have fire doors where they are not required, with the increased enforcement of fire door assembly inspections this will continue to cause confusion and possibly a problem for health care facilities when surveyed by the Joint Commission (you can read about that here).

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Again, thank you all for sharing your insight!  That’s what makes iDigHardware such an amazing resource!

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