Fire rated door in the boiler room for one family.

It was somehow imprinted not only in my mind ( we also own 3 family) that boiler room requires a fire-rated door.
We have one-family, sitting on the hill. Part of the basement is above ground with windows.

We built a nice room around boiler using cinder blocks a couple of years ago to separate it from the future finished part of the basement.

It is not urgent but I kind of was straggling with a concept of the large fire-rated metal door (like we have in 3 family) for our one family.
1. We put cinder blocks right under a new main beam, so the door should be a 6 inches lower then standard.
2. Boiler room has a small window. We replaced rotten old with pretty nice new one and it lets a light from this side. I’d rather not loose this tiny additional light source – other windows are pretty large, but on the opposite wall ( pretty far).

I was thinking it would be a bright idea 🙂 to use some storm door with some glass on a top, but the codes…
And we try to do strictly codes in our renovation/restoration projects even if some of the jobs do not require permits, like building a couple of new cinder block walls in the basement.

To my surprise I recently learned that fire rated door requirement do not apply to one family dwellings in nyc. So… may be half glass storm door is a reality?

Writing this to bounce this idea. What do you think?

opoddubnaya.bootsoft

in Dept. of Buildings (DOB) 17 hrs ago

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Brownstone Home Inspection | 14 hrs ago

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does not. in a one. these things sit in the middle of open cellars all over the city.

jimhillra | 15 hrs ago

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You’re right in that the boiler in a one or two family does not need to be enclosed. However, we’ve had this come up during a construction inspection once where the boiler was enclosed, and we did not want to put in a metal door. The inspector said that if the boiler is enclosed, it needs to have a fire rated door. We didn’t push to see if we could just omit the door entirely, but I can say that because we had a door, it needed to be rated. The situation hasn’t come up since then, so I can’t say if this is consistently applied, or was a particular inspector’s issue.