Maintenance of fire dampers

[Guest MarkPo]

I work as a maintenance engineer in a building holding approximately 3000 people on any given day. An order from management has recently come down that we are to service the buildings 127 fire dampers. Now although all competent engineers in our own fields none of us have ever worked on or with fire dampers before. We all have voiced our concerns regarding the criticality of the correct function and maintenance of these dampers and also our concerns regarding it not being serviced by individuals who have at least seen some dampers before.
I request your advice in regards to the legality of these being serviced by engineers that, although time served and qualified in various trades have no experience of this fire safety system what so ever. If you are unable to help with any advice/legislation on this could you kindly point me in the right direction?

Thank you for your time and hopefully response.

[Tom Sutton]

The person selected by the Responsible Person to carry out fire safety work must be competent.

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, article 18 (5) states,

A person is to be regarded as competent for the purposes of this article where he has sufficient training and experience or knowledge and other qualities to enable him properly to assist in undertaking the preventive and protective measures.

I believe you have two choices one to employ a qualified outside contractor to carry out the work, or get instructions from the manufacture on your fire dampers, regarding testing and maintenance.

First he needs to understand as much as he can about the subject, check out An Industry Guide to the design for the installation of Fire and Smoke Resisting Dampers for background information.

An example of a manufacturer’s information on maintenance, http://www.bsb-dampers.co/home/products/fd_series/maintenance.aspx you need to find the manufacturer of yours.