The building or project condition
An apartment building over ground-floor tenancies, with one contractor holding the whole penetration package rather than each trade sealing behind itself.
What FRS delivered
- Service penetration fire stopping for every trade in the building — electrical, hydraulic, mechanical and the rest
- One penetration record covering the whole building rather than a set per trade
- Work staged across a ten-month programme as each trade reached the rated construction
What made it difficult
- Every trade penetrates on its own schedule, so the same walls are returned to as the services go in
- Sequencing against the trades that conceal the work — once a ceiling closes, the opening behind it costs several times more
- Mixed services through shared openings, where what is already in the hole changes what can be added to it
- Repetitive by floor but never identical — the same detail meets a different service run in every apartment
- Party walls and inter-tenancy construction, where the separation between dwellings is the whole point of the rating
- Wet areas and service risers, where the penetration and the waterproofing have to coexist
- A ground floor of commercial tenancies under residential levels, so the boundary between the two uses had to be right
What was recorded at close-out
- Location-by-location penetration record with before and after photographs
- Certificate of Compliance
An apartment building over ground-floor tenancies, and on most projects each trade seals behind itself. The electrician does his, the plumber does his, the mechanical contractor does his, and nobody holds the whole picture — so at handover there are three partial records, three standards of workmanship, and a set of openings nobody will claim.
Here FRS held the lot. Every penetration in the building, whatever trade created it, sealed to a tested system and recorded against its location. That is the version that survives an audit two years later, because there is one register to look in rather than three to reconcile.
It also removes the argument. When a mixed opening turns up with services from two trades through it, there is no question of whose seal it is or who pays to put it right.
