Apollo Fire Detectors: intelligent fire detection protects Scotland‘s ‘International‘ University

Apollo Fire Detectors: intelligent fire detection protects Scotland‘s ‘International‘ University. Students attending Scotland’s ‘International’ University, Heriot-Watt, are now being protected by a new future-proofed intelligent fire detection system that uses an open protocol. The university, which designed the new fire detection system to L2 standards in-house, specified Apollo’s Discovery multisensor to eliminate nuisance alarms being caused by steam in bathing and cooking areas.

Heriot Watt is often referred to as Scotland‘s international university because it boasts three student campuses in Scotland and one in Dubai. The new fire detection system, supplied, installed, commissioned and maintained by Safe Services, protects students living at the Scottish Borders campus, home to the School of Textiles and Design, in Galashiels, 38 miles south of Edinburgh.

A number of courses from the School of Management and Languages are also run there. Two separate accommodation blocks on the campus, both of which comprised three storeys and one of which was self-catering, required a fire system upgrade. The previous system was 15 years old and no longer met the university‘s fire detection requirements. The two buildings house around 200 students and more than 10 staff in total.

Phasing the Works

The old fire system was addressable with conventional heads and there was a lack of tolerance, causing false alarms. “As there was a closed protocol system in place before“, explains Graeme Millar, Senior Fire Engineer at Safe Services, „the main difficulty with upgrading the system was phasing out the old system and bringing in the new one without losing coverage. Everything had to be rewired as nothing on the old system could be used.“

The work was carried out during normal working hours with students in residence, and no areas of the Halls had to be taken out of use during the installation of over 550 detectors in all, of which approximately 400 are multisensors. The fire protection in the self-catering accommodation block is configured around a two-loop system, while the system in the accommodation-only block is designed around an eight-loop control panel.

The final changeover was completed in a day and a new connection to the alarm receiving centre was created to replace the existing dial up digital communicator.

False Alarm Reduction

The most likely sources of nuisance alarms in the accommodation blocks are the shower rooms and kitchen areas where transient levels of smoke or steam are a common occurrence. In addition, each of the bedrooms is equipped with its own sink so there is a potential source of steam-related incidents in those as well.

All Discovery detectors in Apollo’s range are equipped with inbuilt drift compensation sensitivity, a non-volatile memory and fail-safe operation.

The multisensor detector is equipped with an optical smoke sensor and a heat sensor in one unit and offers five operating modes that are selected by the system designer or commissioning engineer via the control panel.

Certified to EN54 standard in every one of its five operating modes, it can be selected to operate as a smoke detector only, a heat detector only, or as one of three combinations of both.

Contact:

Apollo Fire Detectors Ltd,
 Havant, United Kingdom
Tel.: +44 2392 492 412
Fax: +44 2392 492 754
rowland.davies@apollo-fire.co.uk
www.apollo-fire.co.uk