Fire alarm in new cookery school

[Guest RichardHors]

Richard
Best Regards
Thank you for your time
I am very confused what i need. I am currently constructing a cookery school in a new development in Wandsworth and i need a fire alarm. We have had the building control in and they said we needed BS 5266: Part 1. I have looked this up and it is about emergency lighting. The property is 1000sqft it consists of a small bathroom store room and office and largest part kitchen aprox 800sqft. Is there any chance you could advise me further on what i need. Such as control panel heat detectors etc.

Dear Sir/Madam

[AnthonyB]

Look in Building Regulations - at most, unless the layout is odd, you will only need a Category M fire alarm system to BS5839-1:2013 consisting of a control and indicating panel, manual call points and electrical sounders, all linked by fire resistant cabling.

The only other life safety requirement for smoke detectors would be if your layout has escape from an inner room via an access room, but as your work isn't compatible with smokes a vision panel in the inner room's door would be an equally compliant alternative solution.

You may want detection for property protection (not a statutory requirement) in which case you would provide heat detectors to areas where cooking would be a false alarm risk and smoke elsewhere (or if you want to throw more money at a more advanced system you can have multisensors programmed to react to heat only in the day time and smoke at night). Obviously as a property protection system is mainly for out of hours fires your alarm would need to be either linked to a monitoring station or an autodialler with your and other keyholders numbers programmed.

A lot of Building Control aren't the best at fire and either over specify, costing you money, or let things slide the other way meaning you fall foul of fire regulations at a later date (A passed full plans Building Regs application and completion certificate does not mean you automatically meet the Fire Regs as much as it should).

You usually can use an Approved Inspector instead of Local Authority Building Control & it might help finding one with a sensible head, the BCO you've dealt with obviously doesn't know much about fire by citing the wrong standard!