Hi, Can anyone help me with this one? A medical block is having its fire alarm system upgrades to an L1 system. Therer are currently no smoke detectors in roof voids (below are labatories) Are they required? Thanks for any help. Regards ED

I would. We have them in our labs

In this environment with an L1 system yes they do - thats BS 5839 - missed the 5 off Bruce.

Betta Insurance company...what’s one of those. We don’t all have them, government labs self insure. When our place was designed back in the 90’s we fitted smoke/heat detectors everywhere. At the time it was a state of the art system.(now it’s museum piece)

Hi Ed IS your area NHS if it is it comes under the Firecode rather than building regs also answer this question do you NEED an L1 system, Scenario the Lab is a single room which has one person working in it the travel distance is 4 yards and the void is 995 mm deep, there are no dangers above the ceiling, if i read the above threads i will have to ring my insurance company NOW or the local fire brigade WHY-- so that they can laugh at me. The thing is you put in what is appropriate for the area, after conducting a thorough risk assessment last year we put in an enhanced system in a 10 storey hospital which has 600 beds, Oh my god everyone is now saying its not an L1 in a hospital, we have to have L1 the reason we could get away from putting in a L1. Is we got the local brigade on board from day 1 and we conducted a risk assessment. The system that was in place was put in in the 70s and it was before classification. some areas had heads in some rooms and in other areas there was heads in some corridors To upgrate to a full L1 was out of the question due to A-Cost £1.2-1.5Million pounds B-disruption we would have had to drop every ceiling to do the roof voids (infection control) C-Stop work in a hospital We got the brigade in on day 1 and proved that an enhanced system with a detector in every room, cupboard, and plantroom area was the way to go (Cost £300,000) it would be a massive improvement on the system currently in place and we could also prove due to training of staff etc that we could evacuate safely in the event of an incident. also with the fire separation, Compartments sub compartments etc in our premises that our travel distances would allow a quick effective horizontal evacuation to an area of reasonable safety, they were happy with this. We were happy and the work was started. I would contact your Fire Safety adviser and the local brigade safety section or your local NAHFO (NHS) who will advise.

psycho - entirely correct. A risk assessment should identify the need for this.............however, insurance companies often require some convincing, as do fire and rescue service - who's advice can often vary from council area to council area, and sometimes even between their own fire safety teams. A risk based approach is the best way forward taking account of fire compartments, building use, size, number of people, construction, etc, etc, etc. However, L1 systems do require all areas to be covered (unless I misunderstand the requirements of the standard) which is what the original posting was refering to.