Fire protection, out of sight out of mind?

So, I was wondering how much folks think about passive fire protection in their day-to-day lives. I guess if it’s doing its job, it’s something that we don’t need to worry about, knowing that the correct products have been used and installed correctly. I think I’m a bit of a geek, whenever I’m in a public building I always look at fire door seals and make sure they’re there and installed properly, it drives my daughter mad! The thing is, it’s so important that when I’ve seen issues in buildings, I’m compelled to inform someone as the thought of there being a fire and the people in the building aren’t properly protected haunts me. It’s easy to check things like intumescent door seals being installed and intact and looking at the intumescent paint on the beams on an underground car park, but in normal circumstances, things like intumescent collars and penetration seals are hidden away and so we rely on building inspectors checking them and making sure they’re compliant, not just when a building is being built but on a regular basis.

Also, there is the consideration that as with all industries, there can be differences in quality. Obviously, we can guarantee the products that we manufacture such as the ceramic glazing tape, intumescent tapes, and black fire-rated tapes, but we also make sure that any products that we distribute such as the Lorient seals and Superwool blankets are fully tested and compliant. We’re always on hand for advice as to which products are best to use and this will also give me the chance to be a geek and talk passive fire protection!

Stay safe – Niky.

Why is passive fire protection so important?

The answer to that question in short is obviously to save lives and property, and in recent times, fire protection has hit the headlines with all of the media coverage of the Grenfell disaster. When people asked what I did for a living and I explained that we manufacture and supply passive fire protection products, they looked at me a bit blank, not knowing how to carry on the conversation, but now people seem to understand more about what we do.

Passive fire protection is everywhere, silently doing its job, hoping that it will never have to come into use. From the intumescent strips hidden within doors and the collars around pipes that carry services and wires from one level of a building to another, to the fact that humble plasterboard is 30 minutes fire rated so that there is some level of protection.

I guess most people who go in and out of public buildings and workplaces if asked would expect that there would be fire extinguishers, sprinkler systems alarms, and smoke detectors all around them to keep them safe, but not as many would give thought to the passive fire protection that had been cleverly designed into a modern building or retrofitted into a historic building.

It’s there in your homes, the fire retardant materials used in your mattresses and sofas, your loft insulation is most likely to made from glass fibers and therefore is non-combustible and all three-story buildings must have fire doors installed by law.

Passive fire protection is used in all public transport, with testing methods unique to where the protection will be placed, there are many testing houses or centers with slightly different testing methods and standards that are recognized in different countries, which makes the subject a little more confusing for someone trying to decide which is the best materials to use, but whenever you are fitting passive fire protection, the most important thing is to refer to what has been specified by an architect or a fire officer.

When potential customers contact us, we always make sure that they are confident that they are installing the correct material for the application. If they’re unsure or need advice we’re very happy to help or provide them with the information required to install the correct products and in over 30 years we’ve helped many people, after all, the reason that passive fire protection is so important is that it saves lives.

Bespoke Products

This time I thought I’d discuss some of the bespoke products we’ve made in the past and the stories behind them.

I remember when I was in school listening to dad telling stories about what he’d been working on that day when we were eating our evening meal and being somewhat bored (being a teenager) thinking I would never work at Fireprotect, not knowing that one day I’d be MD!

One story involved working with Unilever on the plant that was bottling a laundry softener. The plastic bottles were very rapidly heated to very slightly melt the surface of the side of the bottle so that a label could be applied without using glue. Sometimes the bottles would get stuck and jam up the line, so workers would have to lean over and unjam them, this meant that some people were burning their arms and chests on the heaters, and dad needed to design a heat shield that would not stop production and deflect any heat. He designed a U-shaped board that had ceramic fiber glued to it with our FCL 007 high-temperature adhesive and then was sewn into a bag made from quartz silica cloth. It proved to be exactly what they needed and until the machinery was redesigned we made these strange-looking things for about 15 years!

We were contacted in the mid-’90s by a very large tractor company, they had a design problem, the exhaust system was too close to the plastic fuel tank, and on occasions in hot countries, it was beginning to melt, not the best thing for a fuel tank to do! After a few discussions, we came up with a metal plate that had been powder coated stuck to a piece of ceramic board with the FCL 007 on one side, and coated with and modified FCL 100 paint with added elements to make the board oil and water-resistant. They would ship the metal plates to us, we would cut up the boards, coat them with paint and then stick them to the metal and they would pick them up again. As with the other project eventually, the need for the heat shield was designed out and so we no longer make these shields, but we still have all the capabilities to make these or similar items.

We have helped design heat shields for rally cars and worked with several racing teams, the most exciting ones being the F1 teams, we‘re not allowed to name names for obvious reasons but we’ve had some very interesting factory tours and always love working alongside such fantastic engineers, I had an offer to go over with the lorries to the Le Mans 24-hour race with one of the teams we worked with, but as luck would have it, I was 7 months pregnant and thought that even though it would have been loads of fun it probably wasn’t the most sensible of ideas to go with them!

There have been lots of bespoke projects, the first one being Ickie the Firebobby, which was going to be a range of children's books and toys to promote fire awareness. Mum and dad made a mock-up of the book and tried to promote toys being fireproof, but they were deemed too expensive and never really caught on. It’s a shame really because there were some good messages in the book, not only about fire safety but also keeping your community tidy and recycling.

We’ve dug out the book and if you’d like a read, click on the link below.

Ickie The Fire Bobby

.pdf

Download PDF • 29.44MB

We have made our self-adhesive backed tapes into gaskets and little packs of cut sizes, we have laminated papers to mica sheets and cut into squares, and pride ourselves in being very adaptive with a good grasp of what the customers’ individual needs are, even down to labels inside center cores and specific labels on boxes.

Let us know what you need (fire protection wise!) and we’ll endeavor to get it made for you.