 Let's see what's on thinking man's mind today. What are life safety plans and how do I use them? That's another great question and one that I get all the time. Come on in and let's find out. Here is a one-story building and this is the life safety plan. What you're looking for to begin with would be the project data. Here it tells me that the code that we're following is a 2021 IBC. Also, we have the 2021 NFPA 101 life safety code and the 2012 Texas accessibility standards instead of just ANSI A117.1 for accessibility, this one may have some differences. But remember when we have more than one code, in this case the IBC and the life safety code, you have to follow the more restrictive code when it comes to the requirements for doors and hardware. So what we're looking for, we're looking for the occupancy classification and here it tells us assembly group A. And if you scroll down further, it gives us our fire resistance ratings of different wall types, floors and things like that. Over to this side and all life safety plans will be laid out slightly different but very similar. And the type of information that you're looking for is going to be the same information. It just may be laid out slightly different. You have a legend with all the different wall types, fire rated, non-fire rated, the different legend here so that you can easily identify which type of wall that it is. And I like this one, the occupant load. You can calculate using the Ossovloy egress calculator and I like to double check some of these figures just to make sure that I agree with the architect if it looks like it might be bigger or maybe even potentially smaller. But the areas of interest, if I'm writing the specification and I'm looking for hardware requirements, this is an assembly occupancy. I do have more than 50 people in the existing portion of the building and the bowling center. And then if I look at the new assembly, there's 129 people there. So I have more than 50 people and I will be needing exit devices if I want to put a lock or a latch on those doors and we'll look at the doors in just a second. We're also looking for things like this, just even finding how they have the exit signs. The exit sign will tell us which side is the egress side or which side is intended to be the egress side. We have things like travel distance to exits, common path of travel, and dead end link. While they're not necessarily door and hardware related, if you see something that is a skew, please point it out to the architect because it's much easier to change things while it's still on paper. We look over here and then they also recap the different travel distances, what the maximums are, how many exits are being provided, and those kind of things. Then if you look at the floor plans, you can see very clearly they give you the, again, the occupancy type, the use for each of the different areas and spaces. In this case, we've got unconcentrated assembly at 15 net square foot per person, which has an occupant load of 43. But you have to combine that with the other assembly occupancy because of convergence. And so the total for this floor means that if I have to lock or latch this stair door, I would need an exit device because it serves an assembly occupancy with more than 50 people. NFPA 101 says 100 or more people. And since IBC is 50, the more restrictive requirements take priority. They take precedence. You can tune into past episode of Code Corner where I address that exact thing. So those are what you're looking for. And then if you see a space and the square footage, this one happens to be 935 square feet, 15 square foot per person, 63 is the occupant load. You could run that through the egress calculator and confirm very quickly. The other thing that you can look for is whether or not the building is fully sprinklered. And they usually will say that somewhere on this right here. So I've got my occupancy type. I know it's a fully sprinklered building. I can put in the egress calculator, either the length and width of the room sizes or the architect has the square footage. Anything that's a business occupancy is going to be low number of occupants. Anything that is assembly will be higher. But in any of the areas, I can now write this hardware specification and not have to guess at things. For more information and continuing education opportunities, please visit Asovlo Academy by clicking in the link in the comments below. Please click like and subscribe to this channel. You can follow me on Twitter at our consultant and or connect with me on LinkedIn for updates. If you have a code question that you potentially would like to see featured on a future episode, you can email me at Catherine.flower at Asoavloid.com. Thank you for joining me in the code corner today. My name is Katie Flower and my goal is to help achieve safe purity in the built environment.