Article 8 of the (RR) Fire Safety Order places a duty on the responsible person in relation to the safety of employees and relevant persons. There is no duty to protect property or premises from fire per se. So if the site is unoccupied and, if a fire was to break out and it  would not affected any other (occupied) premises the requirements for fire safety should be quite limited. The main driver would probably be what your insurer expects. Remember you need to be sure that if a fire was to break out in this property, nobody would be affected, to take this approach.

As A Kurdzial stated, it it usually the insurer who drives expectations. Also, there are the manufacturers recommendations for maintenance of the alarm system - usually annually.

Regarding the equipment, testing frequency is within various standards, which, unfortunately are not free.

I will PM some useful literature.

Originally Posted by: Bigjohn

Some advice please boys and girls. 

We have a unmanned site in which we only need to visit once a month.  We monitor the equipment remotly and have live CCTV to the site. However, the question has been raised on how often we need to test alarms, hold points, smoke detectors, fire pumps from a leal requieement. 

They seems to be a raft of standards and guidance but don’t want to buy a whole lot. 

Any advice.

Thank you.

I am confused what sort of site this is? It has fire alarms and fire pumps, so sounds pretty substantial. I assume the fire detection system is a Cat P (to protect the property and not a usual Cat L - life saftey design??) as its mostly empty

Why on earth have you got 'hold points' (sic)? Do you mean door holders?  If its unmanned with a monthly visit, why the heck would you need to hold the doors open - if that is what you mean?

The fire risk assessment (assuming there is one) should really have dealt with maintenance but here goes.

Assuming its in England or Wales, Article 17 of the Fire Safety Order sataes you must maintain your fire safety equipment. That is the statutory bit - you must have a system

Usually applying an agreed code of practice is enough to be compliant. Most people use British standards. BS 5839-1 requires various tests - including a weekly and periodic tests not exceedly 6 monthly. There's also a quarterly inspection of batteries etc

But a British standard is not law - its guidance. You are allowed to record a variation if you want to do something different from that advised in the BS and supply a business case to support it. So if you only have staff on site monthly, at other times its unmanned, that seems reasonable grounds to support a variation. It might be that the 'weekly' fire alarm test is the first thing staff do as they arrive every month to provide confidence the system is working correctly and will protect them

The periodic tests must be carried out by a competent person

This approach of applying the BS as far as you are able then recording a variation may well suit your needs. However, this all starts and finishes with a Fire Risk Assessment. If you are changing your testing and maintenance regime, this may be significant enough to trigger a review of the FRA. I suggest it should as the review will help in formulating a business case for each variation 

Originally Posted by: Bigjohn

The smoke detectors manufactor (who are the carrying out the service arrangements) have said they recommend to test the detectors every 6 months but they have said they will do half in the first 6months and the other half in the second 6 months.  

In order to test the smoke detectors we have to take half the station off each time they need to test them.

We trying to establish if they can all be done once a year in an outage in which the site will be off line.

In addition to the smoke detectors we have a VESDA system so even if we had a defect with  smoke detectors we would have a more than suitable back up.

In essence, % testing can be useful in very large building or hospitals, however, I don’t think that it is needed in your situation. IMHO they can be done annually.

On another note, are the batteries lead acid?