Firestopping on a construction project is often left until late on, with solutions installed after other trades have finished. But treating it as an afterthought is a risky prospect.
Pre-planning firestopping is essential. It is no longer fit for purpose for pipes, wires or cables to be installed without a strategy, in hope that a firestopping contractor can correctly firestop around them.
“Ultimately this is about life safety, and protecting people and property,” says Craig Wells, sales director at passive fire protection specialists Quelfire (pictured). “The only way to really guarantee that the products are going to do what they need to is to install them in accordance with their tested scope of application. If you leave it too late, you risk having a non-standard or a non-tested scenario.”
When that happens, project decision makers could either be installing products in a non-compliant manner or trying to engineer a solution too late. This generates potential safety risks and increases the chance of having to unnecessarily rework already completed elements of the project such as drylining – adding on unnecessary extra cost.
“There’s a responsibility for designers to think about the bigger picture and not be too arbitrary in their methodology,” says Wells. “Technical design needs to be done much earlier than RIBA Stage 4, and main contractors need to collaborate earlier with the client.”
The timing of firestopping design has been brought into focus in the years since the Grenfell Tower fire and following the introduction of the Building Safety Act. Wells says many main contractors do now consider the issues earlier, but not every company in the supply chain is always ready to join them.
Quelfire manufactures and supplies passive fire protection products and gives extensive technical support to help projects during their design phase. Its representatives oversee early engagement workshops to ensure everyone understands what passive fire protection is and have the required technical information about their walls, floors and services, as well as what fire rating is needed. It also offers continuing professional development training, shares best practice, and provides digital tools for coordinating project information.
It is vital that everyone on a project, including architects, mechanical and electrical (M&E) contractors and M&E designers, gets fully involved in early engagement and are committed to providing as much detail as possible in a way that is accessible to the other parties involved.
This will sometimes be beyond what they provided in the past: architects may go into levels of detail beyond performance specifications, or M&E contractors may extract information from their BIM models.
“This whole approach of looking at firestopping at an early stage is a cultural shift and we all know that cultures don’t change overnight. There’s going to be some teething problems as we go, but ultimately it is needed because fire safety is the most important thing,” says Wells.