Care home

[iclenaghan]

A care home I'm looking at has 16 bedrooms on the ground floor which all have access doors to the surrounding garden. BS5839 makes it clear that breakglass units would be required on all exits from the building into open air, but this does seem excessive, there would be 24 call points on the ground floor!. The system is L1 so there is detection in each bedroom. Has anyone come across this dilemma before?

[Big A]

Surely then it would be straightforward in a risk assessment to justify not having them in residents' rooms.

[jokar]

If it is existing then it may have been a variation in design or install and as the post above you can risk assess it out.  If it is a new system then dependent on the evacuation strategy, PHE, defend in place or whatever and where the assembly point is you can vary the design/install or not.

[stevew]

iclenaghan

I do not know what you mean by 'looking at' a care home.

A competent electrician/fire alarm engineer or risk assessor should be capable of interpreting the recommendations contained within BS5839 to see that any such arrangement would be unreasonable. I would certainly not waste paper and ink by justifying their omission in the premises fire risk assessment. 

Taking advice from a competenttttttttttttttttttttttttttttt advisor would eliminate such questions.

[Galeon]

It can easily be an agreed variation from the B.S based upon specific factors , ie dependent on the residents and type of care home , ie dementia , a call point would have no relevance to them , possibly be misused and lead to unwanted fire signals .
You need to sight of original specification , and if that fails , advise the customer that this needs to be identified and answered specifically.
Personally I would not see the benefit of having mcp's in the scenario you describe. [

[kurnal]

Just make sure that there are sufficient MCPs in the main exit locations, travel distances to a MCP are within the recommendations for persons with high dependency, that if the evacuation strategy for the building identifies any rooms as being used as temporary refuges as part of the progressive evacuation strategy, that these have call points, and if you want to cover your back a one line comment in the FRA and 5839 commissioning certificate will clear it up and leave no doubt that it has been considered rather than overlooked.