Water-repellent fire doors for professional kitchens

Resistant to wet environments, compliant with food and fire safety standards

Professional and institutional kitchens have already long been subject to very strict hygiene standards to guarantee food safety for their customers, and now they are faced with changes in fire safety standards, which are becoming more and more stringent.

Only a few doors in a professional or institutional kitchen will be subject to fire rating requirements. Most of the doors in a kitchen, and in particular the traffic doors inside the kitchens themselves, are not required to be fire doors.

As a general rule, it is mainly the doors separating the kitchen from the dining rooms and, in some cases, from the waste disposal area, that have to be fire doors. It is the architecture design office or the planning permission body that will determine whether a fire rating applies to the different doors in a kitchen.

Until now, the practice was usually to fit food standard doors (made of coated sheet steel, polyester, polyethylene or stainless steel) when hygiene was paramount, and wooden doors whenever a fire rating was required. But wooden doors generally withstand very poorly the moisture and the indispensable regular cleaning. Fire doors in professional, institutional and restaurant kitchens need to be fire-resistant of course, but also water-repellent, water-resistant and rot-proof.

SPENLE has spent many months developing a brand new range of water-repellent fire doors designed specially for restaurant kitchens, and professional and institutional kitchens: the HYDROFEU® range.

HYDROFEU® doors are a genuine innovation as they are capable of being all of the following at the same time:

• fire doors with an EI30 rating,
• water-repellent,
• perfectly corrosion-proof,
• rot-proof,
• extremely resistant to impacts and scratches,
• and resistant to cleaning products.

These fire doors for restaurant kitchens meet hygiene requirements, while also protecting your customers and staff against fire.

HYDROFEU® doors comprise:

• a grade 304L stainless steel door frame which can be adapted for use in renovation projects, whatever the thickness of your partition,
• a leaf made of water-, impact- and scratch-resistant compact laminate,
• intumescent seals, positioned on the leaf and the frame, which swell under the effect of the heat and turn the door into an effective barrier against the spread of the fire.

HYDROFEU® SP150 water-repellent fire doorsets have a test report issued by the EFECTIS test laboratory certifying their suitability for installation in both plasterboard partitions and masonry walls. They can be fitted with locks, EI30 portholes or vision panels, different door closers and kick plates.

Some examples of applications for water-repellent fire doorsets:

• EI30, water-resistant doors to separate the kitchen from the dining area in a restaurant,
• Water-repellent fire doors leading to the waste disposal area.