A one hour rating is a statement about time. The figure describes a period, sixty minutes, over which a rated element is expected to go on holding a fire back rather than letting it through. It says nothing about strength, weather resistance or security, and it is measured under test conditions rather than on site.
Two ideas sit behind any duration. Integrity is about holding back flame and hot gas. Insulation is about limiting how hot the far face becomes, so the barrier does not set light to whatever is leaning against it. They are different properties, and a product can be described for one without the other, which is why the wording on a datasheet repays reading closely.
Sixty minutes is the period most often called for in flats, offices, schools and general commercial work. Longer periods tend to appear around escape stairs, larger plant enclosures and shafts serving several floors. Where your building sits is a matter for its fire strategy, so take the duration from the drawings or from your building control route. If the answer is one hundred and twenty minutes, look at the 2hr fire rated access panels instead.
This is the part that catches people out, so it is worth stating plainly. A duration is never a property of a door on its own. It belongs to a complete arrangement: door, frame, seals, fixings and the construction the panel was set into. Alter one of those and what is in front of you is no longer what was tested.
Two things follow. First, the fitting instructions are load bearing. Aperture size, how the frame is secured and any sealing called for around it are not finishing niceties, they are the reason the arrangement behaved as it did. Cutting an oversized hole and filling the gap with whatever is on the van gives away the thing you paid for. Our installation instructions collect the guides in one place.
Second, position matters. A panel set upright in a wall and the same panel set overhead in a ceiling are being asked to do different jobs, and a rating quoted for one situation should not be assumed to carry to the other. If yours is going into a ceiling, a soffit or a shaft, confirm that first. Ask us for the paperwork on the specific product and we will send what exists for it. If you need a judgement on what your building requires, that belongs with your fire risk assessor or building control body rather than with a supplier.
Most of this list is the familiar arrangement of a metal door in a frame. A few listings are worth calling out because they answer something the ordinary panels do not.
Not every opening wants to be square. A one hour circular panel with a metal door and picture frame suits ductwork, downstands and ceilings where a round cut is tidier. A matching hole cutter is sold with the circular access panels so the aperture can be cut cleanly on site.
One listing here is described as airtight as well as rated. Air leakage matters where the building is being tested as a whole, or where a pressurised shaft or lobby depends on air not tracking through the fabric. An ordinary panel is a hole with a lid on it.
The same listing is described as smoke tested. Smoke moves before flame does and is usually what stops people getting out, so a smoke claim covers something different from the sixty minute figure. What that test covers for this product is set out in its own documentation.
That panel is also listed at 30dB. An acoustic figure describes roughly how much sound a construction removes on the way through, and a panel with none can quietly undo the wall around it in a bedroom or a consulting room. Take the number as listed and ask for the detail behind it.
Within the one hour list the working choices are the frame and the fixing. Picture frames lap over the cut edge and suit an opening formed in a wall that is already finished. Beaded frames take plaster or filler and suit anything still to be skimmed. Both appear with conventional fixing and with the FlipFix clamp system, which is worth weighing where a run of openings has to be hung in a day. The parent fire rated metal door access panels page sets out that comparison in full.
If the door itself should disappear into the decoration rather than read as metal, the fire rated plasterboard access panels take a board insert and a skim, and include a one hour option.
For repeat work, one hour panels are sold in packs as well as singly, and the 1hr fire rated multipacks are the place to look. A pack earns its keep where a job repeats the same detail floor after floor, a housing scheme with an identical cupboard in every unit being the clearest case. Where sizes vary across the job, order singly and keep the schedule straight on paper rather than sorting boxes on site.
