Brunswick Mews

Brunswick Mews, Morley, contains seven flats that have recently undergone a renovation. Innovation Fire was asked to prepare a fire strategy report for one of the flats. Despite being a project much smaller in scale than we normally deal with, it did present some interesting solutions.

The flat in queation had an inner room that was being used as a bedroom, the means of escape was prejudiced by its proximity to a cooking appliance, the travel distance to the entrance door was 13.5m (rather than 9m) and the proposed alternative escape route was from second storey height due to the sloping site.

Several solutions were proposed to solve these non-code compliant problems. The solutions considered were to provide an escape door into an adjacent flat, an escape hatch to a stairwell on the floor below, a protected corridor from the kitchen space, or an alternative escape doorway above the bath from the bathroom to the lobby to the adjacent flat.

All these ‘solutions’ presented significant financial and building security problems. Innovation Fire instead proposed a novel solution in the form of an automatic water mist fire suppression system in the kitchen.

In the event of fire in the kitchen area, water mist will automatically be sprayed onto the fire reducing the temperature in the fire room and reducing the amount of smoke, therefore providing compensation for the increased travel distance from the bedroom and the location of the highest fire risk item, the cooker, which is adjacent to the door to outside.

Another innovative approach from Innovation Fire that provides functionality and cost savings.