Across every service · Escalation

When does a passive fire site condition need technical review?

What changes the answer

• Whether the evidence on file covers the condition actually in front of you, or something close to it. Close is not covered.
• How far the difference goes. A dimension inside the tested range is a different conversation from a substrate nobody tested.
• What the element is doing — a shaft, an escape route or a load-bearing separation carries consequences a store-room wall does not.
• Whether the condition is a one-off or repeats. A repeated condition is worth resolving properly once rather than improvising twenty times.
• Whether the work is already installed, because the question then includes what happens to what is there.
• Whether a fire engineering report already governs that area and has something to say about it.

What to check on site

• The actual substrate, and whether it matches what the detail assumed.
• The opening size and the annular space, measured, against the tested range rather than against the drawing.
• What passes through it now, and whether anything has been added since it was built.
• The required fire resistance level, taken from the document that sets it rather than from a note on a drawing.
• Whether the proposed system has evidence in that orientation. A wall detail does not carry to a floor.
• Whether anybody has already raised it, and what the answer was. The condition is often not new; the record of it is just missing.

What to do next

Send a photograph of the condition, the detail it was meant to be built to, and the document that sets the fire resistance level. We will tell you whether the existing evidence already covers it, whether it needs an assessment from the system holder, or whether it is a fire engineering question — and we will say which before anyone prices it.