Questions · Fire detection
What types of detector are there and where does each one go?
There is no good detector: there is one suited to each place, and it is chosen by what that place gives off when it burns and by what it gives off when it does not. The optical smoke detector is the usual one in offices, corridors, hotels, shops and clean rooms, and it is the one that warns earliest of a slow combustion in solid material. Heat and rate-of-rise detectors go where ambient smoke is normal —kitchens, boiler rooms, car parks, workshops— and they only look at temperature. The multi-criteria detector combines several sensors to tell smoke from steam. The flame detector looks at the radiation from the fire and is useful where the smoke does not reach the ceiling. And the carbon monoxide one detects an incipient fire before there is visible smoke.
Alongside those are the ones that are not point detectors: aspirating detection, which brings the air to the detector through a pipe; the optical beam line detector, which crosses an industrial unit from side to side; and heat detection cable, which watches a whole line. They are used when the height, the temperature or the access mean a point detector is no use or cannot be maintained.
What goes where is decided in the project and not at commissioning, because changing it afterwards means cabling again. And it is decided by also looking at what the air does: air conditioning that moves a lot of volume can take the smoke away before it gets anywhere, and that does not show on a drawing.
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