Webinar - Optimising Smoke Control

Our aim in this webinar was to raise awareness of the dangers of smoke within buildings and how smoke control can be optimised to meet or exceed mandatory requirements. Our ultimate goal is to enhance life safety at every fire door, and given that 50-80% of fire-related deaths are smoke-related, it’s a hugely important topic, and one worthy of detailed discussion.

Our Technical and Compliance Director, Neil Smith, welcomed an expert panel of speakers, comprising of Jim Kelly, Carlsson Elkins and Richard Kowalski.

The full webinar will be available for viewing shortly, but if you didn’t manage to catch it, here is a brief summary of what the webinar covers:

Jim Kelly, Vice Chairman of IFSA and Technical Manager of STS
Jim has been involved in the campaign for more robust regulation around smoke testing for many years. He spoke about the limitation of current testing and his hopes that data recently submitted to MHCLG and BSI will be taken on board in the next round of revisions and eventually trickle down to Building Regulations Doc B.

Carlsson Elkins, Marketing Director, Sertus
Carlsson spoke about door closers on fire doors being fundamental parts of smoke ventilation systems, keeping doors closed so that the ventilation system can work as intended. He also spoke about the importance of not changing partitions or adding smoke doors where they shouldn’t be and working in co-ordination with overall building safety design.

Richard Kowalski, Technical Manager, Stairways Group
Richard looked at some practical on-site issues and how to resolve them early on, thereby avoiding the costly remedying of incorrect threshold gaps.

Neil Smith, Technical and Compliance Director, Rutland
Neil rounded out the webinar by giving some practical advice on the use of door closers in areas where excessive air pressures are found, and smoke seals that may conflict with doors closing.

Thank you to all our speakers for a very enlightening look at smoke control. It confirmed for us that more robust legislation may well be on the cards in the interest of further protecting life safety. We hope that you find it as useful and informative as we did, and look forward to continuing the discussion over the coming months.