Close
Enter your
text here

Top marks for testing!

Top marks for testing! 150 150 Detector Testers
  • no comments

The University of Southampton is typical of many universities – with a number of large buildings occupied by both students and staff.  Buildings include libraries, lecture theatres, classrooms, offices, sports halls and accommodation.  The diversity of these buildings can make compliant testing of all fire detectors a challenge.

One of the buildings, the Estates Department houses a lift shaft with a point detector installed.  Testing of this detector not only requires the presence of a fire engineer but also a lift engineer and facilities staff from the university.  As well as adding cost to the testing – this also takes a significant amount of time and effort to arrange.  On the day of testing, the lift shaft has to be taken out of action, causing disruption to the running of the department and the labelling of each lift button promoting the lift as being out of use.

Another building, the Chemistry Department, houses a number of lecture theatres and high hallways.  These contain concealed aspirating smoke detection (ASD) systems which span across a secure area.  The pipes path, linking the ASD panel to the fire panel have a security door in between – which again means significant labour, time and cost are needed when testing.

The hard-to-access nature of these locations has led to the contracted fire and safety maintainer, Detect Fire & Security, considering Scorpion.

The justification of installing Scorpion has seen the maintenance company and the building manager analyse the cost of installation against the cost of accessing the detector by other means.  They considered cost areas such as access equipment, additional personnel and also the amount of time it would take to organise.  The decision has been taken to install Scorpion, with installation recently complete and the engineers surprised at how easy it was to carry out.  Future tests of the detectors can now be easily achieved from ground level – crucially at the same time as all other detectors and without the need for additional personnel and planning.

For more information about Scorpion, contact Detectortesters on 01707 282760.