Passive Fire Protection Surveys
Fire Stopping and Fire Doors
Sentinel Construction Compliance (Jersey) Ltd. offer fully accredited, third-party inspections for both fire stopping and fire doors. Whether your requirement is for a single building, or a full estate, our experts are on hand to deliver detailed surveys.
With broad, multi-sector experience, we specialise in delivering inspections in occupied buildings, providing our clients with all the information needed to make informed decisions on how to maintain passive fire safety in their buildings.
Fire Stopping - The Critical Role of Compartmentation
Effectively 'stopping' a fire from spreading throughout your building, fire compartmentation is the most effective means of limiting fire damage before the fire brigade arrives.
By dividing building premises into "fire compartments", fire is contained by forming a barrier against smoke, heat and toxic gases. This effectively holds the fire in the area of origin, providing protection for the building and its occupants.
Due to the vital role compartmentation should play in your overall fire strategy, it's fundamental that both the fire resisting partitions and fire doors should be properly installed by expert teams who fully understand the importance of correct product installation for maximum fire safety.
What to Expect From a Compartmentation Survey
Our surveyor will visually inspect all areas of the identified compartment lines within your building to assess their likely performance in the event of a fire. Defects in compartmentation lines can take numerous forms and require expert identification.
Common defects include: simple penetrations, such as pipework entering or exiting a compartment with no gaps, or inappropriate firestopping, allowing smoke or fire to potentially pass from one compartment to another.
Others defects include, cabling, voids, ducts or linear gaps where compartment lines do not fully encapsulate the compartment. These defects are either latent, from the original build, or imposed from subsequent works. Both are re-iterating the need for regular inspection.
What type of Compartmentation Survey do I require?
There are a number of differing compartmentation surveys available. Dependent upon the type and use of your building, your fire strategy, and potentially the recommendations of an existing fire risk assessment, you may choose different levels of compartmentation survey. All inspections can cover common areas and dwellings dependent upon scope.
Indicative
Sentinel Construction Compliance (Jersey) Ltd. will undertake all elements of the "standard" compartmentation survey, but only to selected floors or areas of a building. This will give you the same detail of electronic reporting within your chosen areas, from which our surveyor will extrapolate results to enable indicative results to be presented for review.
Standard
Our standard survey is classed as "invasive". This means we will review all areas of the building, along with inspecting some harder to reach areas, such as roof voids, above suspended ceilings, and through inspection hatches in solid ceilings.
Enhanced
This option provides all the benefits of the "standard" survey, but includes additional indicative destructive works, including a percentage of identified areas for further investigation. In most cases, this will include 10% of soil vent pipes and 5% of behind architraves.
Destructive
All elements of the "non-intrusive" survey, together with a pre-defined scope of intrusive works that are defined as a greater requirement than the enhanced survey option.
The best way to answer "Why firestopping?" is by looking at the statistics:
- 75% of all fire deaths are caused by smoke inhalation
- Over half of fire-related deaths occurred in rooms where the fire did not originate
- Smoke can fill a 20 foot by 20 foot room through a pencil size hole in less than 4 minutes
Fire Door Surveys
Fire door inspections involve the application of a defined set of protocols/inspection/survey checks to determine the condition of an existing fire door. A pass and fail criteria is agreed and remediation and repair solutions are provided to bring the fire door back to its original condition. An inspection certificate is issued on completion with a detailed report. Fire door inspectors have the appropriate knowledge, training and experience to apply these checks, and are usually FDIS, BRE or BM TRADA qualified.
Third-party fire door certification provides an additional level of assurance of both the level and consistency of performance relevant to the door for both manufacturer and installing contractor. It provides an independent, technical process for evaluating and approving the fire door or installation against a set of defined criteria in standards and procedures.
The Importance of Inspections to Fire Doors
The key to passive fire protection is to contain the fire to a particular compartment or room, giving occupants enough time to escape and the fire service enough time to enter the building and tackle the fire. Designed to prevent the fire or smoke from spreading, a fire door is one of the most important fire safety products on your premises.
However, due the nature of fire doors being used in a functional way on a regular basis, they are at greater risk of damage and abuse, seriously compromising the fire protection in your building. This is why it's key to ensure regular surveys and remediation, preventing the need for replacement, and more importantly, ensuring your buildings remain compliant.
What to Expect From a Fire Door Survey
Sentinel Construction Compliance (Jersey) Ltd. specialise in the surveying of fire doors and frames. We have a breadth of experience across many sectors, from busy commercial areas, to the well-used corridors of hospitals to the vulnerabilities of social housing.
All our surveys are fully work-programmed with client stakeholders. Our well-trained fire door inspectors methodically work through a building, utilising the latest technology and software to manage inspections onsite and record the data in real time. We dynamically capture the essential details and condition of each door, creating a database for future ongoing inspections.
Areas of non-compliance are visually highlighted in a way that allows organisations to prioritise maintenance activity and expenditure. This is primarily to accommodate budget constraints, while demonstrating an understanding of the nature and scale of the problem.
The survey creates a door schedule, and records the history of each door to provide information for analysis, both in terms of fire compliance and ongoing remedial cost. This is a unique system that allows a robust and highly cost-effective maintenance plan to be developed and managed by all internal stakeholders for the lifecycle of the building.
