PBC Today sat down with Charles Devenish, managing director of Adexon Fire and Smoke Curtains, to explore the limitations of BS 8524 fire curtains and the importance of third-party certification for life safety products
As the managing director of Adexon Fire and Smoke Curtains, Charles Devenish has been in the fire and construction industries since founding the company in 2005.
Adexon is one of three specialist businesses within the Cubex group; the others are bespoke high-performance security gates and specialist metal-hinged fire and security doors.
Can you explain what BS 8524-1 is and what it’s primarily used for?
BS 8524 Part 1 is a product standard for fire curtains that was published in 2013. You might see it in the construction industry, but anyone can use it.
Whilst BS 8524 was the first product standard dedicated to fire curtains, as with most standards, there was room for improvement. However, its biggest hurdles remain its specialism in a very niche market which potentially makes it nonviable to invest in for Notified Bodies (not enough potential customers), plus the arrival of BS EN16034 in 2014.
Warringtonfire and IFC Certification are the only two Notified Bodies that have supported BS 8524-1 historically, but both have now withdrawn support for the standard.
The BS EN 16034 European Standard was published in the Official Journal of the European Union (OJEU) in 2016, meaning it would become formally harmonised and legally required under the Construction Products Regulations after the three-year coexistence period.
In the foreword of the harmonised standard, conflicting national standards, which include BS 8524, were to be withdrawn from use in October 2019.
Despite this, BS 8524 carried on beyond that date as a nice-to-have standard due to being heavily marketed in the UK. However, this has dropped off with it no longer having any Notified Body support and fire professionals not being able to advocate for a life-safety product that doesn’t have valid third-party certification.
There have been concerns raised in recent discussions about the use of BS 8524 fire curtains. Can you elaborate on some of the drawbacks and limitations associated with their application?
An example in BS 8524 is a test called the ‘hot motor test’. It could be a well-intentioned test, but it requires significant refinement and control measures before it could be considered safe. And even then, the applications and combination of events are far too rare to justify its inclusion in a safety standard.
In our opinion, to enable someone to potentially open the fire curtain when the temperature is 400°C on the other side is dangerous. You may be on the safe side of the fire curtain, and the temperature on the other side could be 400°C, and technically that motor would still operate.
Firefighters don’t even train above 200°C temperatures.
Opening a fire curtain at 400°C would be fatal for the user, and the fire and smoke could spread.
We have written an article on this subject which is an insightful short read.
What benefits does third-party certification for fire and smoke curtains bring to the table compared to self-declaration or manufacturer-claimed performance?
The whole industry is unanimous about valid third-party certification from a Notified Body being a prerequisite for life-safety products such as fire curtains. This has been the consistent and emphatic message for the last ten years from every corner of the industry.
We should not now change our tune just to support manufacturers of BS 8524 fire curtains which no longer have valid third-party certification. Doing this does not gain credibility and respect and won’t engender confidence in the consumer.
Third-party certification is not a legal requirement, but it’s effectively mandatory for life safety products.
The benefit of third-party certification for fire and smoke curtains is that there is assurance that the product being purchased is the same product that was tested.
With manufacturer-claimed performance, nobody is checking that manufacturer-claimed performance. There’s no accountability to a third party to ensure that what they’re making day in, day out, and what they’re selling to the market is the same as what was tested.
Valid third-party certification is the closest you’re going to get to a guarantee. And it takes you from 100% risk being on you as a buyer to close to 0% risk being on you.
How does the certification process contribute to overall building safety?
There will be a product standard that a manufacturer wants to assess their product against e.g. BS 8524-1 or BS EN 16034. The manufacturer, like ourselves, will go to the Notified Body and request certification against this product standard.
The Notified Body will have to create a certification scheme, which will set out how they’re going to measure and assess the manufacturer’s testing and control of manufacture against the product standard.
An accreditation body such as UKAS will then audit and assess the Notified Body and the scheme before providing accreditation to them, thus enabling them to offer third-party certification to manufacturers for that product standard.
BS 8524 is going through a revision now, which won’t be a quick process. The standard may come back better and become available again, or it may be finally withdrawn permanently as being a conflicting standard with the European harmonised standard BS EN 16034.
Through the certification process, there is a lot more process, structure, and accountability, all of which benefit overall building safety.
Can you explain how the side guide by Adexon solves the problems associated with BS 8524 fire curtains?
The problems often associated with the use of fire curtains can be traced to an old design. Currently, people who have BS 8524 do use this old design. Indeed, we used to use it ourselves up until five years ago. We realised the problems needed solving, they were not going to go away on their own, and they were limiting the potential growth of the fire curtain market.
We realised that if fire curtains were going to fulfil their potential, then we needed to overcome these headaches so that people wanted to use them rather than it being a product as a last resort.
Problems associated with the old design primarily include the use of a metal stud popper or bolt through the fabric, which will stop the fabric from coming out of the side guide where it runs.
Often, these poppers or metal bolts can jam in the side guide and catch in the aperture that they’re designed not to pass through. This means that the fire curtain won’t deploy at all.
Another common problem with the old design is gaps in the fire curtain, where poppers or studs tear loose and/or tear in the fabric itself. Over time this gap will get bigger, and the fire can potentially spread through these gaps.
Adexon’s steel pole design offers seamless, continuous fabric travel
Adexon Fire and Smoke Curtains have overcome these issues by using a design with a steel pole in the guide, which means that the retention of the fabric is continuous.
There’s no puncturing of the fabric, so it doesn’t tear. Because we’ve not got any moving bolts or poppers, there’s no scope for jamming.
Another thing we’ve also done with our design is we use the actual fire-resistant fabric, which is tested on the curtain itself, which we use to create the smoke sealing. We believe, and I think everyone would agree, that it’s superior to using a cold smoke seal, which melts.
Fire-resistant fabric is a much better way of providing a smoke seal for hot and elevated temperatures.
Vertical fire curtains have been required to be CE marked to the harmonised standard BS EN 16034 since November 2019. Can you explain the significance of the regulation and how it ensures the safety and performance of fire curtains in various building scenarios?
The regulation in play here is the Construction Product Regulations 2013, which the UK signed up to in the summer of 2013, making compliance a legal requirement.
If there’s a harmonised standard for a product, then you have to CE mark products to that standard.
As above, BS EN 16034 became harmonised on 1 November 2019, making it a legal requirement to CE mark vertical fire curtains to it from that date.
There was pushback a year earlier from some here in the UK for various reasons, one being that we had BS 8524, and that was now being superseded.
It was our own standard, we created it and were rightly proud of it, and that was now being superseded by a European standard.
What the CE marking for all vertical fire curtains means for the consumer is a level of safety and consistency of expectation for the product.
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