What Is Passive Fire Protection?

When it comes to accidents that could destroy your business, a fire is perhaps one of the most deadly because it can take lives very easily and also wipe all of your data and hardware, making your business effectively redundant. In many cases, simply reacting to the fire isn’t enough to stop it from spreading quickly and destroying your office so it’s important to have a pre-emptive method of protecting yourself from fires in your office or business. That’s where passive fire protection comes in handy. Passive fire protection is often used to describe a number of different strategies and products that are used to passively help you deal with fires. For instance, it could mean some kind of product that is installed into the structure of your building when it’s first built or it could mean a product you retrofit such as a fire collar around certain cables and pipes that are newly installed. In this article, we’re going to talk about passive fire protection and learn why it’s such an important component of your building or office.

What is the purpose of passive fire protection?

Contrary to popular belief, passive fire protection isn’t entirely about preventing fires–it doesn’t even have prevention in the name! Instead, the purpose of passive fire protection is to maximise the amount of time people in your building have to evacuate before the fire brigade arrives. As the technology and methods used improve, it could eventually turn into a method of complete prevention of fires in the office, but that’s a very difficult and expensive goal to achieve so the focus is primarily on extending the amount of time people have to react to a fire in the building. This distinction is actually a very important factor when it comes to the type of products used in passive fire protection. This is because the products are designed to actively stop the fires from spreading and little care is given to preserving the individual compartments where the fire starts. For instance, fire collars and sleeves are installed on pipes that could contribute to the spread of a fire from one building compartment to another. These passive fire protection products will crush pipes and seal them when they’re heated, effectively rendering the pipes useless and will require a replacement after the fire is dealt with.

Active and passive fire protection

Active fire protection refers to anything that needs a follow-up action in order to help stop or combat a fire. For instance, a smoke detector will ring when it detects a fire, and a fire extinguisher needs to be used in order to stop a fire. Active fire protection is therefore reactive and requires some form of input from the user in order to protect against the fire. On the other hand, passive fire protection doesn’t require any user input. For instance, a fire door can form an effective barrier to stop fires from spreading, but it doesn’t require the user to use the door and it will help protect against fire regardless of the user being present or not. Similarly, fire-rated glass and materials are also considered passive fire protection.