Fire Shutters, Fire & Smoke Curtains
Openings a door cannot close, and smoke a wall was never going to stop.
Overview
Some openings cannot take a conventional fire door. A wide retail frontage, a servery, an atrium edge, a loading opening, a space where the architecture will not carry a leaf and a frame. A fire shutter or a fire curtain closes that opening when it needs to be closed and stays out of the way the rest of the time.
And some spaces have no opening to close at all. An atrium, a mall void, a car park, a floor plate too big to divide — the problem there is not fire crossing a line, it is smoke filling a volume. That is what a smoke curtain is for, and FRS installs a lot of them.
Because all of it sits idle for years and then has to work once, the installation and the ongoing service matter more than the product. A shutter that has not been released since it was commissioned is not evidence that it works.
What FRS can take on
- Fire shutters — supply and installation to openings a doorset cannot close, in new work and in existing buildings.
- Fire curtains — where the headroom, the architecture or the opening geometry rules out a shutter.
- Smoke curtains — automatic and static, where the job is to control where smoke goes rather than to close an opening. See below.
- Commissioning and drop testing — proving the shutter actually releases and closes, and recording the result.
- Servicing and repair — on a routine cycle, or after a release, a strike or a failed inspection.
- Records — what was installed, where, the test report behind it, and every release since.
- We work in occupied and operating buildings where the opening cannot be shut off for long, and we plan the outage before we arrive rather than negotiating it on the day.
Smoke curtains
A fire curtain and a smoke curtain look like the same thing rolled up in a housing, and they are not doing the same job. A fire curtain is there to hold a fire resistance level across an opening. A smoke curtain is there to decide where smoke goes — to hold it at a level, keep it out of an escape route, or channel it to where the building’s smoke exhaust can reach it.
That is why a smoke curtain usually arrives on a project through the fire engineering report rather than off a standard detail. It is part of a smoke management strategy for a space that could not sensibly be closed off with a wall, and the report is what sets its extent, how far down it comes, and what makes it deploy.
Deployment height is the part that catches people out. Many smoke curtains are designed to come part of the way down and stop, holding smoke above head height while leaving the space beneath clear for people to walk out under. One installed to the wrong height, or one that runs to the floor when it was never meant to, has not merely failed to help — it has changed the escape route.
They come down on a signal from the fire detection system, so installing them is only half the work. The curtain has to be proven against the cause-and-effect matrix: the right detector, in the right zone, dropping the right curtain, to the right height, in the right time — with what happened written down.
What FRS takes on
- Automatic smoke curtains — the deployable kind, rolled in a housing and released on alarm.
- Static smoke curtains — fixed downstands and barriers that are simply always there, at an atrium edge, around a void, or under a slab.
- Installation into the surrounding construction: the fixings, the headbox, the side guides where there are any, and the junction with the wall or slab the curtain is relying on to do anything at all.
- Commissioning against the cause-and-effect, with the deployment height measured and recorded rather than assumed.
- Servicing on a cycle, and rectification after a deployment, a strike, or a failed inspection.
If the fire engineering report calls for a smoke curtain and the drawing shows a fire curtain, or the other way round, tell us before anything is ordered. They are not interchangeable, and the wrong one is an expensive thing to discover at handover.
Commissioning and drop testing
A fire shutter is a machine that has to work once, years from now, on the worst day the building will have. Everything else about it is inference. Commissioning is where that inference gets tested: the shutter is released the way it would release in a fire, it is timed, it is watched the whole way down, and what happened is written down.
Then it has to be done again on a cycle. The single most common condition we find is a shutter that has not been released since the day it was commissioned — sometimes since the building opened. Guides fill with dust and paint, the motor and brake sit unused, the release mechanism seizes, and somebody stores pallets under the opening. None of that shows on a visual inspection from the floor.
Fire shutters and curtains sit inside routine service obligations along with the rest of the building's passive fire assets, so we service them on the same cycle as the doors and dampers rather than as a separate visit — see Passive Fire Maintenance.
When it has already failed
A shutter that will not close, closes part-way, will not reset after a release, or has been struck by a forklift is a defect with a date on it, not a maintenance item. Send photographs of the opening, the housing and the guides, the make and model if there is a plate on it, and the last service record if one exists. We will tell you whether it is a repair, a replacement or a scope that needs the manufacturer, before anyone prices it.
What changes the solution
The size and shape of the opening, the fire resistance the separation has to achieve, how the shutter is released and by what, the headroom and side space available for the housing and guides, the surrounding construction it fixes into, and whether people pass through the opening in normal use. A shutter specified from a width and a rating alone usually meets one of those and not the rest.
Drawings, photos or a defect report in front of you?
Send what you already have. We will tell you what else is needed before the work can be reviewed, priced or booked for site inspection.