Energy & Utilities
Passive fire on assets that stay energised while you work on them.
Overview
Substations, switchrooms, control and relay buildings, power stations, battery storage, water and wastewater treatment plants, and the utility infrastructure buildings scattered around all of them. Fire Rated Systems installs, inspects, rectifies and certifies the passive fire work in them.
The work itself is ordinary — doorsets, cable transits, penetrations, rated construction. What is not ordinary is getting to it. On a live asset the network does not come down to suit a contractor, so the planning is the job and the installation is the easy part.
Access is the programme
Entry to a live site is granted area by area under the asset owner's permit and switching regime — authorised, inducted, escorted, and only to what has actually been released. Approach distances around energised plant are fixed and they do not move for anyone's schedule.
So we scope against the access that will genuinely be available rather than against the drawing, and mobilise able to finish what we are let in to do. Turning up and finding out on the day costs a second mobilisation and a good deal of the asset owner's patience.
Where an outage is genuinely required we say so at pricing. On a transmission or distribution asset an outage is booked months out, and it is not something anyone wants to discover halfway through a job.
Switchrooms are cable rooms
A switchroom, a relay room or a control building is a room full of cable, and almost every passive fire item in it is a transit or a penetration carrying that cable through a rated wall or floor. Fill ratios, bundling and the substrate all decide which tested system applies, and a transit carrying four hundred cables is not a larger version of one carrying six.
These rooms also keep changing. Every new circuit is another cable through the same opening, which is why we install transits that can be opened, added to and re-recorded wherever the evidence allows it — so the next contractor can do it properly instead of cutting your seal out.
Remote and regional assets
A good share of this infrastructure sits a long way from Perth. The crew, the doorsets, the hardware and the materials have to arrive together and be right, because a return trip is measured in days rather than hours.
We plan these the same way we plan a mine site: confirm the site conditions before anyone leaves, carry the spares that experience says get needed, and close out the paperwork on site rather than from the office a fortnight later.
What you get from us
- Fire-rated doorsets for switchrooms, relay rooms, battery rooms and plant buildings — supplied and installed complete, or inspected and repaired.
- Cable transit systems through rated walls and floors, selected for the actual fill and substrate.
- Service penetration fire stopping for every trade on the site.
- Fire-rated construction around cable risers, trenches, shafts and plant enclosures.
- Inspection, baseline surveys and asset registers for assets that are visited on a cycle rather than daily.
- Defect rectification staged around the access the asset owner can release.
- Asset information, photographs and certification covering the work we carried out.
The conditions we plan for
- The asset stays energised — Methods, tools and materials chosen to suit work near live plant, confirmed before we price.
- Permit and switching regimes — Access area by area, under the asset owner's system, with the authorisation in place before anything starts.
- Utility-specific inductions — Completed before mobilisation, not on the morning of the first day.
- Outages booked months ahead — If a scope genuinely needs one we tell you at pricing so it can be planned into the outage, not squeezed around it.
- Exposed and remote sites — Weather calls belong to the asset owner, and the programme has to allow for the days the site is closed.
Questions
Frequently asked questions
- Can you work on a site that stays energised?
- Yes. That is the normal condition on a transmission or distribution asset, and the work is planned around it from the start. Where a scope genuinely needs an isolation we say so before you commit, so it can go into an outage rather than hold up the job.
- Do you hold the inductions and permits?
- Tell us whose asset it is and we will confirm what our crews already hold and what has to be completed before mobilisation. It is part of the pricing conversation, not an afterthought.
- Can you do regional and remote sites?
- Yes. A large share of this work is outside the metropolitan area, and it is planned so the crew arrives able to finish rather than able to start.
- Can cables be added to a transit we already have?
- Sometimes, depending on the system and how full it is. Send a photograph of the opening and we will tell you — see the Technical Library on adding cables to an existing transit.
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.