 Welcome to this episode of Door Hardware Nerds. I'm your host, Mia Merrill. Today I'm joined by our favorite host, Katie Flower from Code Corner with Katie. But for those that don't know her, Katie, why don't you introduce yourself and tell us about what you do here? Thanks Mia, it's great to be back. And I've been working with Asob Loy for almost 17 years. I've been in the industry for 38. I absolutely love doors and hardware, but my biggest passion has always been building codes. And I work as a full-time instructor for Asob Loy Academy, so I get to meet a lot of people and help influence them. And teaching codes is like I said, it's just near and dear to my heart. So welcome today. And one of the questions that I have had, and I think a couple other people may not have even thought about is as we head into the holidays, people are decorating their doors, whether they're at a school or even at their homes, how can putting decorations on your door affect your fire door ratings? That's a great question. And a lot of people don't even think about it. And that's part of the problem. They don't know the codes and standards and nor should they really. NFPA 80 tells us that on a fire door, signage should be limited to 5% of the square area of the door. And if you think about that, that's not very much. And you can't attach signage to the glass. So if they're putting decorations on glass, that's even worse. So if you've got a school classroom that has a narrow light, a vision light and they put signage or some kind of poster over it or something like that, that could affect how the door reacts. I was just in Iowa last week at our Mason City Curries facility and witnessed the fire test. We do those for our foundation training so that people can see how rigorous that fire door test is. Within the first five minutes of the door being in the furnace, the temperature rises to a thousand degrees. And this was a half glass door that had a film on it and the film disintegrated, it melted. You could see it, it was on the non-exposed face. So on the outside. So even if your door isn't, even if the fire isn't in your apartment or in your classroom, if the fire is on the other side, it can burn the materials that are on the door. It can create smoke. Smoke is the leading cause of death in a fire. So if whatever decorations or posters that you put on that door, they can catch fire just from the heat and then create all that smoke and possibly do a lot of harm. Yeah. So this would probably apply to the surrounding walls as well too, huh? Right. The thing about the walls in fire ratings, the door is not rated as high as the wall because the wall is subjected to fuel loads, things like furniture and wall hangings and art. They already build that in. So a two hour wall has a 90 minute door. Classroom doors in a high school, for example, if they're rated at all, they would be a 20 minute exit access door and 20 minutes doesn't sound like a lot of time. But in that fire, the fire test that we just witnessed, it was a 20 minute test. Not only in the first five minutes did it get up to 1,000 degrees, but over the course of the 20 minutes, the end temperature was close to 1,500 degrees. That's very hot. And when they moved the door away from the furnace, you could feel the extreme heat. We were standing probably 30, 40 feet away from the opening behind a protective partition. But even then it's just amazing how hot that really was. So the door itself is not rated as much as the wall because you're not supposed to stack boxes or things in front of the door that you could in front of the wall. So the wall is much more durable to protect from fire, but the door, if it's closed, does its job to keep the smoke and the fire out. Just be careful of the decorations you put on it because that can make an effect. Okay. What types of buildings, so if you are inside this building, what types of buildings should people be mostly aware, most acutely aware of not decorating their doors? I would say if you live in an apartment, you definitely wanna keep things off your door. Usually there's, you've got your lock, you've got your security latch, you may have a door viewer so that you can look out, but don't attach anything to your main door. If anything, put them on the wall, put your decorations on interior doors. Hotel rooms are typically not decorated, so that's not an issue, but I see classroom doors all year round, not just at the holidays. And you don't want, even if a classroom door isn't fire rated, if it's a fully sprinkler building, it's probably still smoke rated. And so again, for those same reasons, we don't wanna have that fuel load at the door. Maybe hospitals, if, for example, a patient bedroom, you don't want them to put posters, even though it may seem cheery, put them on the wall and not on the door. All right, good. Any final thoughts today? Just, I think that videos like this are very important in helping to teach the general public because we in the door hardware industry know the importance of doors. I also showed a video of what happened with a fire, with the door closed, the outside of the door was almost, everything was black and disintegrated. They opened up the door, the apartment that was inside was untouched, not burned by fire, not hit by smoke. So fire doors and smoke doors have a very big important role, and it's our job to continue to educate the public to know what they should or shouldn't do. And so I thank you for asking this great question. I thank you for coming on, and I'm gonna summarize two important points before we wrap up today, which we don't normally do. Number one, if you are decorating your hallway, decorate the wall, do not decorate the door. Number two, we didn't talk about residential too much, sleep with your bedroom door closed because like Katie said before, smoke inhalation is basically the leading cause of death in a fire because it prevents you from waking up or getting out. So sleep with your bedroom door closed. If you have young kids, get a baby monitor, put it in their room. My husband and I changed the way we sleep now. We've got two baby monitors and everybody sleeps with their door closed. That's what's gonna save your life this holiday season and every day. So for more information, if you want to learn about fire codes or any other codes, you can go to the Asa Abloy Academy and they've got a lot of great courses or you can also visit Door Hardware Nerds and any of Katie's Code Corner episodes. Thanks for watching.