The Secret Life and Death of a

fire alarm door magnet keeper plate

The door magnets are probably the least understood feature in our building. They owe their existence largely to a combination of laziness and forgetfulness. They're an easy and convenient way of propping open a fire door, i.e. one of those internal doors that are supposed to be closed in the event of fire. You don't have to remember where you put the door wedges, you don't have to take a fire extinguisher off its holder to prop open the door, and what's best: you don't have to remember to close the door when you leave the building. So if you happen to read the sign saying "Fire door - keep shut", you can do what most people do with most signs: ignore it.

I still vividly remember, when I bought vegetables from the field at Avonleigh for the first time, I walked straight past a gigantic sign saying in enormous letters "Please wait here", and didn't actually notice the sign's very existence until I was ushered back behind it. But I digress.

Back to the doors held open by the door magnets. Yes, you can ignore the sign, because if the fire alarm goes off, the electromagnetic thingy will have its electricity cut off, as a result of which there won't be anything magnetic anymore, so the door magnet keeper plate (the humble part that sticks on the door) won't have anything to hold on to anymore, and, hey presto, as if by magic, the door will close. Clever, innit?

So far, so good. However, sometimes you do want to close that door. So how do you do it? If you paid attention, you will already picked up on one option: setting off the fire alarm. However, this is not always very practical, and would not be much appreciated by the residents upstairs. So what other ways are there? Brute force seems to be a popular choice among Friends. No wonder that two of three door magnet keeper plates were broken when I arrived as a Warden 9 years ago. The kitchen door magnet keeper plate was the only one still intact. In my naivety, I considered it to be impossible for anyone other than Hercules himself to close the kitchen door with brute force. How wrong I was! Over the years, I observed the accomplishment of this task three times with my own eyes. Each time it was a different Friend in her 70s performing this extraordinary feat of physical prowess. And so it came to pass that, before the year 2021 came to an end, this last surviving door magnet keeper plate had to bite the dust. After too many occasions being torn between a powerful magnet and a more powerful Quakerly arm muscle, it did what everyone would have done in its place: it broke into two.

Now there happens to be a third way of closing a door held on a door magnet. If you paid attention, you would have noticed that it's something to do with electricity being switched off to close the door. How do you switch the electricity to the door magnet off (other than by setting off the fire alarm)? - Yes, exactly: with a switch! The doors to the library and the main meeting room have switches in the corridor, roughly at the same height as the door handles. The kitchen door magnet, located on the floor, has a little black push button acting as switch. Just press it down, and you can close the kitchen door non-violently - and keep the (new) poor fire alarm door magnet keeper plate happy.