Passive Fire Protection vs Active Fire Protection

Passive Fire Protection vs Active Fire Protection

Fire Protection
Fire protection is something that we should all be thinking about and aware of. It’s always better to be safe than sorry when it comes to fire safety matters. Your building’s fire safety can fall into a couple of different categories: passive fire protection and active fire protection. These are meant to work together in the event of a fire, so it’s worth finding out more about them, the differences and how you can get them right in your home or building.

Passive Fire Protection

When building an office or home or a block of flats, passive fire protection is a major factor to consider. It matters because it’s geared towards preventing the spread of a fire once it starts. This can limit the damage and potentially save lives in the process. It can also slow down the fire for longer, allowing people to get out unharmed. This is all done by using fire resistant walls, floors and doors throughout the building. Fire and smoke dampers can also be used to stop fires spreading via ducts in the building.

Active Fire Protection

Active fire protection on the other hand is all about using devices and things like that to stop the fire in its tracks. They’re called active because there’s some form of action is involved, whether that’s manual action or automatic action. For example, fire extinguishers are examples of active fire protection because they can be used to put out fires. Then there are automatic devices like smoke alarms that warn people to get out and sprinkler systems that help put out and stop the spread of fires in the building. These active fire protection methods can be used together to prevent deaths caused by smoke or fire.

The Key Differences to Understand

By working in conjunction with one another, active and passive fire protection methods can make buildings much safer and prevent people getting hurt in the event of a fire breaking out. Just because active fire protection can kick in and halt a fire right away, that doesn’t make passive protection redundant because active devices like alarms and sprinkler systems can and sometimes do fail. And the spread of the fire will be much harder if passive measures are in place while active protection does what it’s meant to. There’s no sense in trying to replace one form of fire protection with another because it simply doesn’t work like that. Instead, you should make sure that there are active and passive measures in place that can complement one another and work in tandem to deal with fires. Even the best active fire protection system can be aided and improved with the help of good passive fire protections. The key thing to take away from this is that these fire protection systems are meant to work together to provide you with the very best safety and protection. When they do that, you and your family will be a lot safer as a result, and that’s what everyone wants.