Fire stopping in Cranfield

Buildings with dense services and rooms that cannot simply be shut.

Cranfield means the university and the airfield, so the buildings are mostly teaching, research and technical ones. We have no job in the village to point to, and we are not going to make one up. What follows is how we would go about a building like that.

Pink foam packed around cables beside a metal channel

Dense service routes

A lab block has far more pipework, cable tray, conduit and ducting than an office floor does. A fair amount of it crosses fire walls. When a piece of equipment moves, the routes move with it, and the old openings are not always closed.

On a survey we follow each service through every wall it crosses. That takes longer than a block of flats, and the report runs to more lines.

Rooms that cannot close

A lab with an experiment running, a server room, a workshop with a class booked in. Some rooms are hard to shut for a day.

We agree the rooms, the days and the order before we arrive. One room is open at a time. The gaps are sealed, the dust sheets come up and the room is handed back. If a room stays off limits to us, the report says what we did not see.

Purple cables passing through holes in a blockwork wall

Ducts and dampers

Ventilation ducts go through fire walls in almost every lab wing. We seal the gap round the duct. Whether the duct has a working fire damper is a separate matter. We would say if one looked missing, but we do not test them.

Above the corridor

Over a corridor there is normally a ceiling void. Where a lab wall stops at the ceiling tiles instead of running up to the roof deck, that void is open along the whole wing. A cavity barrier closes it.

Two drilled holes in a blockwork wall, each marked with a letter in pen

Records

We photograph each opening before and after, and number them to match the survey. For a building with an estates team, that fits straight into a maintenance file.

Who does the work

Sealing is carried out by our BM TRADA / FIRAS-certificated contractors. We manage the days.

Getting to Cranfield

We come from Luton and have no premises in Cranfield. Tell us the building and how many floors, and we will say what we need to see.

Questions we get asked

Do you work to a site's permit rules?

Yes. Tell us the rules before the visit and we will plan round them.

Can you work out of hours?

Sometimes. Say what you need and we will tell you if we can.

What we check

Other areas we cover

Holes in a wall that should be sealed?

Tell us the building, how many floors and what has been found. We will say what we need to see and give you a rough estimate.

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