 Welcome to this episode of Door Hardware Nerds. I'm your host, Mia Merrill. How often are you out and about, and you see a door like this? It's just blocked with random obstacles, especially if there's an exit device on there. You need to make sure that that door is not blocked. Now that we have those obstacles out of the way, why don't we want to block doors, especially fire doors? Well, for two reasons. Number one, it could be your only source of egress. So in an emergency, we need everything out of the way so you can go through that door. The other thing is, is we don't want any of those obstacles to fall in the door as the door's trying to shut. We rely on fire doors to stop the spread of fire from one side to the other. So what do I want to look for? Well, number one, we want to make sure that there's nothing keeping this rail from extending. And mainly, we're making sure that the lock can come out and still interact with the strike. So no zip ties, no jamming things in here, nothing like that. The other thing we want to look for is that there is a closer. In the event of a fire, we want that door to always close. It means that the fire is going to be prevented or slowed from spreading from one side of the door to the other. So how do you tell if an opening is fire rated? We can come to the exit device. On the side here, there are labels. This one is the UL Fire label. So you look there, it should still be on the device. It's required to be. So don't take them off when you install them. Now, when we're checking if the device has the ability to dog, there is usually some sort of a hole that a hex key can go in. You want to make sure that that's not there. Just so you can see what that looks like on multiple devices, over here is where you would dog this device down. Another place to take note is both on the door as well as the frame itself. These happen to be windstorm labels, which if you're in that type of territory, you should probably look for this as well. So important to note, don't paint over these. We've had to have folks go through, scrape it, and have a whole building re-inspected because of it. So we hope you enjoyed today's little reminder about fire doors. Don't block them. Don't dog them. Thanks for watching, and if you could, give us a like on the video and subscribe to the channel if you're not already.