Structural fire damage and potential loss of life have been avoided after a fast and orderly evacuation of a block of apartments in Blackpool, after a fire. One of the tenants returned home after a night out and prepared some food. They then fell asleep and the kitchen caught fire. The Fike TWINFLEX smart two-wire fire detector raised the alarm and its alarm confirmation meant evacuation of all the tenants before the escape route became compromised. Firefighters arrived in time to put out the fire before significant damage to the rest of the building. The fire detection was installed by DD Fire Alarms, which fits alarm for houses of multiple occupation (HMOs) and hotels. The TWINFLEX control panel is mounted in the entrance hall and is connected to 26 Multipoint detectors, which are installed in the five apartments and communal areas. Each Multipoint detector can be configured to any one of seven detection modes, allowing it to be matched to its surrounds. In this case, the detectors were set to low-sensitivity smoke to reduce false alarms, apart from the kitchen, where the detector was set to heat mode. The smoke detectors in the communal areas were set to a higher sensitivity. Each Multipoint detector can include an integral 90db sounder. Darren Johnson, Managing Director of DD Fire Alarms, said: “The building is wired on separate zones with alarm confirmation delays programmed so the alarm in the rest of the building is only raised if there is a genuine fire in one of the flats. This ensures false alarms are all but eliminated. In fact in the two years the Fike TWINFLEX system has been installed there has only been one false alarm and that was from a tenant activating a manual call point.”
As for the alarm confirmation built into the TWINFLEX panel, zones are designated dwellings or communal. A user can set a pre-alarm for dwellings, allowing time to investigate the cause of the activation before evacuating. This can be programmed between one to five minutes. Activation in a communal area will initiate a full alarm at once. When a fire is detected in a dwelling only the local (room) sounder will operate during the alarm verification period to warn the occupants. If the detector is still generating an alarm signal after the configured pre-alarm time, the control panel will sound all alarms in the building for full evacuation. This approach ensures safe evacuation in the event of a real fire, as demonstrated here, but doesn’t cause disruption from false alarms.
For further information
Contact Fike Safety Technology on Tel: 01633 865 558, Email: [email protected] or visit www.fikesafetytech.co.uk.
