An office is typically a room within a building where companies carry out business activities. Offices tend to be located in office buildings – hundreds of offices, small to large are housed in one business park.
As office buildings are frequently open to the public and are home to many businesses, with many employees, it is crucial that effective fire detection equipment is in place.
Goodyear Dunlop Office Fire
In early 2016, an extreme fire broke out in the ventilation system of the office area in a car part warehouse in Birmingham, Goodyear Dunlop Tyres. Over 100 firefighters spent around 5 hours tackling the blaze and had to wear special breathing apparatus due to its severity, the smoke was out of control. Residents nearby were told to close their windows and workers from a local Jaguar Land Rover plant were evacuated.
Fortunately, the fire took place out of office hours and no one was injured – the fire was under control before it had chance to spread to the tyre storage area. However, the fire did cause severe traffic build up due to a number of road closures and the business was forced to remain closed while repairs were carried out, resulting in major downtime to the business and lost revenue.
What are the Fire Risks Associated with Offices?
Offices tend to be the home of many employees, and those located in office buildings have thousands of neighbouring occupants, with many other professionals entering the building each day for meetings and visits. Therefore, many lives are at risk if a fire is to break out, especially if there is no proper fire safety equipment in place.
Lifts are also unavailable during the event of a fire, meaning those who have trouble using the stairs are more at risk of being unable to reach fire exits in time if the fire is not detected early.
As many companies are entirely based in the office, they have a high chance of losing business if they can’t access their office or essential data, resulting in loss of revenue and potential unemployment for many staff across the building.
There are number of fire risks associated with offices such as:
- Electrical equipment may overheat.
- Damaged power leads and cords may spark and ignite a flame.
- Overloaded power sockets may cause them to overheat and start a fire.
- Combustible materials like recycling, packaging and loose paper are typically stored in the office.
- Smoking.
The Importance of a Reliable Fire Alarm System in Offices
With the large amount of people accessing the building at different times of the day and there being a wide range of risks associated with fire in the office, it is essential that effective and reliable fire detection equipment is in place.
Cost Effective Solution
Eurofyre are proud, British manufactures of specialist fire detection equipment for industrial and commercial use. They offer a cost effective solution for offices across the globe and believe that every client should have the flexibility to select their own fire alarm maintainer, and, therefore, provide an ‘open protocol’ solution to give the owner complete control over how their system is managed.
The Most Common Fire Detection Systems Used in Offices
Analogue Addressable
Analogue addressable fire alarm systems offer a reliable, high quality and complete fire detection solution for complex, small to large scale applications.
Eurofyre’s ProFyre range of intelligent analogue addressable fire alarm systems are constructed on a flexible communication protocol that is expandable in order to meet future developments.
As well as this, the ProFyre range offers two different fire alarm panels. The ProFyre A2 which is well suited to medium sized applications and the Profyre A4, which is perfectly suitable for larger applications.
2-Wire Addressable
Eurofyre’s ProFyre 2-Wire addressable fire alarm system benefits from addressable and 2-wire technologies giving complete wiring flexibility.
The ProFyre T8 is well suited to both small and medium-sized applications. It provides all the advantages of an addressable system, with the simplicity of a conventional system. The ProFyre T8 has a wide range of unique features such as cable breakdown identification, auto configuration, system monitoring and alarm verification.
Conventional
Our ProFyre conventional fire alarm systems offer a fully featured, cost effective detection solution that has been designed with ease of installation and commissioning in mind.
Eurofyre offer two versions of the conventional fire alarm system – the ProFyre C24 which is suitable for medium sized properties and the ProFyre C8 with is perfect for smaller applications.
To find out more about any of Eurofyre’s fire detection systems feel free to contact Eurofyre on +44 (0)1329 835024 or by email to [email protected]. For all the latest fire protection news sign up to our newsletter using the form at the bottom of your screen or follow us online on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and Google+.