Clients

Fire and Safety Solutions Ltd have worked for a large range of customers throughout the UK, below are a selection of recent key clients.

Case study: Royal Albert Hall

There are 328 portable fire extinguishers standing by at the Royal Albert Hall. Head of operations, Martin Spence, explains: “We have our own team of fire officers and our security officers are also trained to very levels of fire safety. They carry out nightly visual checks on all the portable fire extinguishers and this exceeds the British Standards recommendations. For maintenance of the extinguishers we rely on a professional company called Fire and Safety Solutions Ltd”.

Fire and Safety Solutions Ltd has supplied the Royal Albert Hall with new extinguishers and carried out the scheduled and emergency maintenance since 2003. The company also looks after the venue’s dry riser systems. Describing his annual service visit which takes around one week, managing director, Paul Wilkinson says: “I start from the top and work down. This means the first extinguishers I check are up in the roof where the poppies are dropped from. Then it takes about a week for me and my team to service all the other extinguishers in the building”.

Each extinguisher, depending upon its type, is serviced according to the British Standards requirements. Most of the extinguishers in the Royal Albert Hall are foam or CO2 types but there are also powder extinguishers protecting the plant rooms.

“To ensure no extinguisher is missed and the client knows exactly what I’ve done, I work from a location plan of the building which records every single extinguisher” adds Wilkinson. “We also use a site information card system to record the history of every extinguisher in the building so we can instantly see how many times each has been serviced or refilled. I also introduced a policy of keeping 25 or so spare extinguishers on site in the fire room, so damaged or discharged extinguisher can be replaced instantly by the in-house team.”

Spence was keen for Wilkinson and his team to install extinguishers with colour-coded caps. Although all portable fire extinguishers should now be red in colour, they have to carry a colour-coded label, identifying the extinguishing medium contained inside. This label has to cover at least 5 per cent of the outer body of the extinguisher. However, a colour-coded cap in addition to the coloured label makes the extinguisher even more recognisable and helps to ensure the right type will be used in a real fire situation.