The Guild of Architectural Ironmongers (GAI) has added two new end user guides to help property owners, managers and occupiers maintain the safe, effective, and efficient performance of their building hardware.
The GAI end-user guides detail maintenance recommendations and care of finishes for relevant materials, as well as providing checklists to help the user with safety critical products such as fire doors, escape doors and automatic doors.
The two new guides – available to download free of charge from the GAI website at www.gai.org.uk/users – address the needs of all those involved in the operation and maintenance of a building (post-handover) across the education and healthcare sectors. They join existing guides for the commercial and the residential sectors.
The Guild will be publishing a further guide in 2024 focussing on the hospitality sector.
As well as making these resources easily available to property developers, facilities managers, maintenance companies, occupiers and anyone involved with the care of buildings following their post-construction handover, the GAI is urging specifiers, installers and all those involved in the hardware supply chain to include them in their customer service processes.
GAI chief executive Simon Forrester said: “While architectural ironmongery typically comprises less than 2% of the cost of a new building, its impact on maintenance costs can be as much as 20% of the total budget in some sectors.
“In addition, aside from its role in a building’s design aesthetic, properly functioning hardware is critical to the property’s ongoing safety, security, and accessibility.
“All of this makes proper maintenance and management of building hardware as important as the correct specification and installation.”
Douglas Masterson, GAI technical manager, added: “Architectural ironmongery is fundamental to every building, it should perform almost unnoticed and be maintained appropriately to ensure its purposes are not compromised.
“We have tailored these guides to individual sectors to offer specific information for that sector, offering useful information on keeping properties secure, the lifetime costs of maintaining ironmongery and what to do in the event of a fire of other emergency.”
The free GAI Architectural Ironmongery End-User Guides are available to download along with other hardware user resources at www.gai.org.uk/users
