Getting the Building Regulations just right!
1st September 2009
The other week I was party to a Building Regulation package put together by someone else and was curious to find specification that I believed wasn’t required.
I contacted my local Building Control and they confirmed that there was over-specification and that, actually, they were not under any obligation to highlight where a specification un-intentionally went beyond the Building Regulations. This is something that for a long time lurked on the periphery of my mind but was never really an issue.
Having said that only until recently I laboured under the impression that a fire door to a loft conversion on the second floor was not in question. For the first time I haven’t gone with Local Authority Building Control (used MLM Building Control) – we wanted to use Actis Tri Iso Super 10 on a loft conversion. Imagine my surprise when I learned that a fire door to the loft room might not actually be required!
The logic was that it’s the protected stairwell from the loft room (the escape route) that required protection from fire hence all doors onto the stairwell to be FD30. The actual loft room itself didn’t present a risk to the stairwell as, in the event of a fire, a person would be wanting to get out into the stairwell to escape. Does that make sense?
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This self-certification business usually seems to mean that you have to buy in to a scheme, eg for glazing (windows / doors) it is FENSA. You really need to be a specialist to want to do that. Fees, paperwork, groans.
As far as insulation is concerned it is no doubt better to specify in excess of current regs. Interesting article by Mark Siddall on thermal bypass – then take a building site at random and inspect the standard of insulation installation detailing – gaps everywhere, which will however get approved by BC – thus evn just following the regs amounts to mere tokenism.