Next, a leading UK high-street clothing and home furnishings retailer has selected Vesda early warning smoke detection solution to protect its warehouses.
When you have 450 high-street stores and millions of customers relying on you to provide the latest fashion every year, you had better ensure that your key product warehouses have the best possible fire protection to ensure business continuity.
Typically, large clothing and home furnishing warehouse environments are characterised by high ceiling heights and highly stacked product racks, where a fire can rapidly become very large if not detected and controlled at an early stage.
Additionally, the impact of the high environmental conditions is that any smoke is not provided with sufficient buoyancy to rise up to the ceiling, and the high airflow results in a large amount of dilution of any smoke, making it difficult to detect for conventional smoke detectors.
Vesda systems continually draw samples of air from the area and assess these samples for the presence of smoke. The aspirating smoke detector is therefore an active smoke detection system which ensures the earliest possible warning of a possible fire.
Vesda draws in air through a pipe network that can be placed where the smoke is most likely to go. This provides an effective means of very early warning smoke detection, typically at return air grilles. It is also possible to use these systems to initiate fire-suppression systems at a much later stage in the fire development cycle. An air sampling detection system can detect smoke concentrations as low as 0.005 per cent obscuration/m up to 20 per cent obscuration/m. Obscuration is the effect that smoke has on reducing visibility. Staged alarms and time delays can be used to avoid nuisance alarms.