Once a ceiling closes or a shaft door shuts, photographs and location records become the only evidence that passive fire work was done correctly. Good documentation records what the opening was, which tested system was used, the product details, the exact location, and images from before, during and after — enough that someone else can identify it years later without guessing.
The problem with invisible work
Consider two identical buildings. In both, the fire stopping was installed perfectly. In one, every seal was photographed with its location noted. In the other, nothing was recorded.
Three years later an insurer asks both owners for evidence. The first owner sends a file. The second owner pays for an audit to discover what they already own — and the audit can only check what is still accessible.
The physical work in the two buildings is identical. The position of the two owners is not remotely similar.
What to record, at the moment it is done
This takes seconds per seal at the time and cannot be reconstructed afterwards at any price.
- Location — building, floor, room or grid reference, and shaft or riser identifier, using the names on your drawings.
- Barrier — what the wall or floor is, and the rating it is meant to achieve.
- Service — what passes through it: cable bundle, plastic pipe, tray, duct.
- System reference — the tested system the installation follows.
- Product and batch — what was actually used.
- Photographs — before (the open hole), during (backing and packing), after (the finished seal).
- Date and installer — who did it and when.
- A unique reference — one code that carries the location inside it.
The “during” photograph is the one people skip and the one that proves the most. A finished seal looks the same whether the mineral wool behind it was packed properly or barely present. Only the middle photograph shows that.
Nothing gets covered until it has been photographed. On our own projects this is not a preference — an unphotographed seal is an incomplete seal, and the five-step process treats the photograph as step five rather than an afterthought.
Four people who will need this file
| Who | When | What they need from it |
|---|---|---|
| Your facilities team | Continuously | To know what is behind a panel before opening it, and how to put it back |
| A maintenance or fit-out contractor | Every change | To re-seal correctly instead of patching with whatever is available |
| Your insurer | At renewal or after a claim | Evidence that the passive fire package exists and was installed to tested systems |
| An authority or accreditor | At inspection | A located, photographed record mapped to the standard |
Scroll sideways on a phone.
Three of those four are asking years after the building was finished, which is exactly when memory has failed and the original subcontractor is unreachable.
Making it survive the handover
Records get lost at transfer more often than they get lost at creation. The builder has them, the developer has them, and then the building is sold or the FM contract changes and nobody can find the file.
- Keep it in a format anyone can open — a PDF register and an image folder beat a proprietary app nobody renews.
- Name the image files with the finding reference, not the camera's number.
- Put a copy with the O&M manuals and a copy with the fire strategy documents.
- Label the physical work too — a small tag at the riser door pointing to the reference.
If you have inherited a building with no records
This is the normal situation, not the exception. Most buildings older than a few years have no usable passive fire record, and it is not a crisis.
The practical route is to survey what is there, start the register from that survey, and add to it every time work happens. A passive fire audit is the fastest way to create that baseline, because it produces the located, photographed record as its output rather than just a list of problems.
From then on the rule is simple and it is the only one that matters long-term: nothing gets sealed, opened or re-sealed in this building without a photograph and a line in the register.
