Condominium Fire Escape Doors: What Access Control May Lock.

Can a condominium lock its fire escape doors?

Not against the people inside. By-law 173(1) of the Uniform Building By-Laws 1984 is one sentence: “All exit doors shall be openable from the inside without the use of a key or any special knowledge or effort.” A card, a code and a fob are keys in that sense.

The other direction is untouched. Controlling who comes in is not controlling who goes out, so access control on a staircase door is ordinary. It is one layer of integrated ELV systems for buildings.

By-law 17(1) of the Third Schedule to the 2015 Regulations lets a management corporation “require any person on the common property to identify himself for security purposes”. Nothing in the prescribed by-laws authorises restricting egress, and by-law 166(2) keeps the common property exits “readily accessible at all times”.

What must the door do when the fire alarm sounds?

It must let go. By-law 173(2): “Exit doors shall close automatically when released and all door devices including magnetic door holders, shall release the doors upon power failure or actuation of the fire alarm.” Two triggers, either sufficient, and the words are “all door devices”, not one named product.

That makes the lock part of the fire system. The signal comes from the fire alarm system by-law 237(1) requires, so the obligation is a cable, and the question is not which reader was fitted but whether that cable exists.

What is the difference between fail-safe and fail-secure?

Both describe the secure side of the door — the reader side — not the side a person escapes from. They are not a safety grade. A fail-secure strike on a lift lobby door is ordinary: the inside lever works whatever the power does.

It is a safety question where the hardware decides whether a person can get out. A maglock is the clearest case: the magnet holds the leaf, with nothing mechanical behind it. Access-controlled egress doors are held by fail-safe devices “such as magnetic locks and electric door-strikes” so that they “automatically unlock when power to the locking device is interrupted”. A misbehaving reader is a different matter: see why an access card stops working.

What by-law 173 does not say

It says the doors release. Not for how long, not that a manual release is required, no sign, no listing standard. No Malaysian Standard was found that fills those gaps, the same silence as the absence of a Malaysian standard for CCTV, so the trade borrows an American one.

That convention is NFPA 101, summarised for installers by DASMA: an egress door on an access control system “must always allow egress whether power is present or not”; a manual release cuts power to the lock “independent of the access control system electronics”, and once pressed “the doors shall remain unlocked for at least 30 seconds”; where the alarm released them, they “must remain unlocked until the fire-protective signaling system has been manually reset”.

None of the right-hand column is law here. A building that wants it must write it into the specification.

Does a condominium need a fire certificate?

Usually not. A fire certificate is one “issued by the Malaysian Fire and Rescue Department (BOMBA)”, and section 28(1) of the Fire Services Act 1988 says “Every designated premises shall require a fire certificate”. The Schedule reproduced by IPM Group from the 2020 amendment order runs to nine entries: library, hospital, hotel, hostel, office, shop, factory, place of assembly, storage.

A residential block is not among them, though a building can be caught through any entry its parts fall under. That removes the annual inspection, not the Act, whose fire-hazard definition reaches “any unlawful alteration to any building such as might render escape from any part thereof in the event of a fire materially more difficult or less easy” and, with no alteration at all, “inadequate means of exit from any part of a building”. A compliant lock is neither. A door that will not release is the second.

Whose duty is the staircase door?

The building’s. A staircase and its doors are common property, and section 21(1)(a) of the Strata Management Act 2013 puts a joint management body under a duty to keep it “in a state of good and serviceable repair”; section 59(1)(a) says the same of a management corporation. A lock that no longer drops on the alarm has left that standard.

A joint management body may not contract for maintenance and management beyond twelve months, so an obligation to test the release must survive an annual re-tender. A stuck door is usually found at a drill, which designated premises must hold “at least once a year” and a condominium need not hold at all.

What a committee can check this week

Walk to a staircase door with no card in hand and push it from the inside. Then establish what the building believes happens when the alarm sounds, and watch it at the next test. The first test is by-law 173(1); the second is by-law 173(2).

The last is a written rule: by-law 172(1) says storey exits must be marked by readily visible signs and “shall not be obscured by any decorations, furnishings or other equipment”. With no drawing to check against, that is the as-built drawing problem in what a JMB inherits at handover; the testing belongs in the maintenance contract.

Why do these doors fail when two contractors share them?

These doors fail quietly for a structural reason. The lock belongs to whoever installed the access control, the panel to whoever maintains the fire system, and the contact between them to nobody — so nobody tests it and neither service report mentions it. That is what goes wrong when a building’s ELV systems are split.

Occhio Tec is an Extra Low Voltage contractor established in 2010, working mainly on condominiums in Mont Kiara, Bangsar and KLCC. It designs, installs and maintains CCTV, access control, video intercom and structured networking, and takes over systems another contractor installed. What a door does on the alarm cannot be read off a drawing: request a site survey or message +60 11-6494 4931.