Thank you Klaus for sharing your lighthearted, but also educational article. At Winchmore Hill we have regular fire doors with closers so I can't offer any advice on products from first hand experience, a quick search did yield this product and I'm sure there would be others: https://www.ironmongerydirect.co.uk/product/exidor-9870-electromagnetic-fire... From the installation instructions it says: TESTING (WITH POWER) 1. Ensure the switch is in the 'ON' position (or symbol). 2. Open the door to at least 65° and ensure that the door holds open. 3. Gently pull the door to check that the door can be manually pulled off hold. 4. Open the door to the hold position and test the release by activating the alarm system (where applicable) or other emergency power shut down mechanism. Which seems to imply that it will hold the door open past 65 degrees but will allow the door to be moved 'off hold' manually. It doesn't require any plates. Not cheap however. I've had first hand experience of the types of fire doors with magnetic plates you mention when I went to secondary school. It was a new school and opened in 2001, and I attended from 2002, so the second year to join. Each corridor had at least two sets of doors with the magnetic plates, I can only imagine they had to change quite a few over the years with 11 to 18 year olds playing with them! Best wishes, James Wilson Premises Administrator Winchmore Hill Quakers 59 Church Hill, London N21 1LE 07549 352126 On Thu, 19 Jan 2023 at 09:54, Klaus Huber <boawarden@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Friends,
Like many Meeting Houses, Bradford on Avon has a fire alarm system, and we have several doors that act as fire doors and therefore should be shut. However, it's often convenient to have them open, so we opted for holding them open with the help of door magnets that are connected to the fire alarm. If the fire alarm goes off, the magnets get released and the doors shut. In principle a clever system. However, our fire door magnets have one major design fault: to close them, you need to press a switch button. This is obviously too sophisticated for most people, so the majority of people are closing the doors with brute force. As a result, the door magnets keep breaking. About a year ago, I replaced the third of three door magnet keeper plates (and wrote the article pasted below that went into our Local Meeting newsletter), now the magnet unit itself of the same door has been ripped out. Does anyobody else use fire door magnets? And if so, have you come across anything that is unkaputtbar, as we would say in German (or anything that never gets kaput, as it would be in English)?
Many thanks, Klaus Huber Resident Warden, Bradford on Avon
PS. For your amusement, here's the article that was published in the January 2022 edition of the Bradford on Avon Quaker Meeeting newsletter. Just days later, I observed a Friend yet again closing the same door with brute force.
*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.
-- Klaus Huber Warden Bradford on Avon Quaker Meeting House 1 Whiteheads Lane, Bradford on Avon BA15 1JU Tel. 01225 865393 bradfordonavonquakers.weebly.com
_______________________________________________ wardenship mailing list -- wardenship@lists.quaker.eu.org To unsubscribe send an email to wardenship-leave@lists.quaker.eu.org