Surveying a Skyscraper

We have the privilege of being able to survey entire skyscrapers as part of our daily work. There are a few buildings that we survey annually, with great delight.

What’s the purpose of the survey?

As you can imagine, skyscrapers have hundreds of doors in them, and no maintenance staff can check all of them. There simply isn’t the time.

Instead, they employ professional door experts—yours truly, for example—to thoroughly survey every single door. Is it closing properly? Are all of the signs still on the door? Are the intumescent strips in good condition? Stuff like that.

It’s important that all doors are in good nick, not just because they’re useful tools for the regular operation of the building, but also because most of the doors in the building are fire doors. It’s important that they all work correctly, in case the worst should happen.

Our client gives us a list of doors to be surveyed (for reasons I’ve never understood, not every door needs to be surveyed every year) and we go out and do the stuff. Normally it’s two of us who go: one person to make the assessments, and another to take noted and help carry tools.

If anything is repairable on the spot (e.g. a door closer that needs adjusting or a hinge that needs tightening) we’ll do it. Anything else (e.g. broken handles) needs to be quoted for following the survey.

How long does it take?

The duration of the survey depends entirely on the scope of the survey. Our biggest survey yet took over two full days. That was for a building with 25 storeys in Canary Wharf. Most other surveys take about a day each, give or take a couple of hours.

Of course, afterwards you need to do the write-up, so that the client knows exactly the state their doors are in. What usually happens in the write-up is that 80% of all doors are doing fine, 10% have a smallish (usually stuff like missing hinge screws or a broken door closer), and 10% have lots of problems that need plenty of time to write up.

What sort of things do you encounter in skyscrapers?

Most of the problems happen in the communal areas (i.e. places to which all employees have access), and the maintenance corridors. The communal stuff is subjected to normal wear-and-tear, since the doors are used a lot. The maintenance corridors, on the other hand, aren’t necessarily used as often, but they’re used in a different way.

For instance, refuse trolleys and other large supply trolleys are carted are often shoved through saloon doors in the corridors. This tends to cause a lot of damage to the door over time. Even chunky metal doors will bend and break because of this.

Skyscrapers are full of exciting stuff, though. The biggest ones tend to have huge generator rooms, for example, which can keep the building running for days in the event of a power cut. They include massive diesel generators (the air there is thick with the smell of oil), as well as massive amounts of batteries which are kept constantly charged, just in case. The generator rooms can be hugely noisy, so you have to wear ear protection before going in.

We also normally have the privilege of being allowed to go onto the roof (lots of doors lead to and from the roof areas). That’s always a breathtaking place to be. It doesn’t matter what you can see from the view: if you can see for miles in any direction from up there, then you’re a lucky fella.

What’s a ‘cheap skyscraper’?

Having surveyed various tall buildings all over London, it’s easy to see a sort of quality difference between them. While each building presumably cost hundreds of millions to build, you can often tell which buildings spared expense and which didn’t. It shows how even skyscrapers can be ‘cheap’.

But these are all things that a tenant would never notice. As far as they’re concerned, the building does everything it’s supposed to. It’s only when it comes to maintenance that you might notice things.