fire resistance between floors

[Guest R. Jones]

Hello,

I am currently converting the first floor of a building in to 5 self contained flats. These are located above an amusement arcade on the ground floor.

I have been advised to create 1hr fire resistance between the G and 1st floor. The only issue I have is that removing the glass tiled ceiling in the arcade to do this would be extremely slow, costly and would shut down the business for a while which I cannot afford to do. Are there any other common ways of creating fire resistance, or would installing something like a sprinkler system and connected fire alarm on the G & 1st floor be suitable mitigation, preventing the need to install fire resistance between the floors?

Any help would be appreciated as I really need to avoid removing the mirrored tile ceiling if possible.

thank you.

[AnthonyB]

A sprinkler system would cost even more and be more disruptive and you wouldn't have anywhere for the supply tanks and pumps.

You need to get in touch with a fire engineering consultancy to see if there is an engineered solution they can come up with.

You could look at leaving the ceiling as is and underdrawing it with the requisite fireboarding rather than remove it 

[Tom Sutton]

Check out Rockwool Flexie page 5 at https://static.rockwool.com/globalassets/rockwool-uk/downloads/datasheets/floors/flexi-datasheet-web_141015.pdf and contact Rockwool to see what they think.