FOCUS
Safety and communications
in 2017-183
was ‘to be overcome by gas
or smoke.’ This suggests that current fire safety
measures do not detect fires fast enough. It also demonstrates the need to employ fire safety technologies that offer reliable early detection and suitable intervention to either delay the development of the fire or to notify people, so that they can take the appropriate action at the early stages of the fire to prevent it from spreading or causing severe harm. Considering the fire safety issues highlighted in
BRE’s research concerning the protection of vulnerable people, the research group put together 14 recommendations targeted at existing technologies in order to offer further safeguarding for people in the future. This included providing additional warnings from smoke alarms, developing video analytic techniques, reviewing fires from electrical items and monitoring temperatures from multi sensor or smoke alarms incorporating thermal sensors to provide warning of rising temperatures.
Watermist applications
One recommendation which was encouraging to see from BRE was that of increasing the use of combined detection and suppression watermist systems, similar to the Automist Smartscan. Recommendation five in the BRE report stated: ‘Rather than having just one
44 MAY 2020
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fire alarm and one local suppression solution, the extension of this to cover multiple zones is recommended. ‘By utilising multiple fire alarms (including heat alarms in the kitchen), and implementing pipework with appropriate heads, the water mist can be provided to different areas using one control panel in such a way that zones could be addressed and configured so that the water mist suppression is delivered in the area in which the fire is present.’ Watermist systems provide early fire detection
in residential properties and work by having a smoke detector connected to a control unit that triggers local watermist suppression. The system’s effectiveness4
has been proven in domestic
environments and offers significant advantages over sprinklers. In fact, we at Plumis recently conducted our
own tests at the Fire Protection Association’s test laboratory to see how sprinklers measure up to the Automist Smartscan against a challenging oil fire in a kitchen. As pointed out in BRE’s research, it is in this room that the greatest number of serious fire injuries occur. The results showed that the traditional
sidewall sprinkler activated after one minute and 49 seconds, in comparison to the Automist Smartscan which took just 55 seconds. Once activated, the latter was able to successfully put out the fire in one minute and eleven seconds, but it took the sprinkler one minute
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