Prevent Damage With Passive Fire Protection

We don’t spend our days obsessing over the worry that out house may somehow fall victim to a fire, or at least, we shouldn’t. There are some basic steps that you can take to minimize the chances that it will ever happen to us by making structural changes and additions to the house. This type of action is known as passive fire protection and it concerns the materials used to build the house, coatings that can be added to the walls, beams and pipes and compartments that the house may be broken into to retard a fire’s progress.

As opposed to active fire protection which involves sprinklers, fire alarms and fire extinguishers, passive fire protection is actually always at work to stop or retard a fire. It is in the way the building is built and the materials that are used to build it.

Passive fire protection can be broken down to four key areas:

1. Structural fire protection which guards the essential parts of the building should a fire break out. Supporting beams, walls and ceilings are all coated with insulation.


2. Compartmentalization involves ensuring that the fire can be contained to a single area of the building by use of fire barriers such as fire-rated walls, floors and ceilings.


3. Opening protection by installing fire doors and windows and surrounding them with fire resistant frames so that they won’t be distorted in a fire.

The aim of passive fire protection is to contain a fire in the same part of the building as it starts, limiting the damage it will do to other rooms. Measures such as coating the walls, ceilings or subflooring with materials that will slow that spread of a fire are commonly seen in buildings for this purpose.

It is extremely common to see thick layers of vermiculite coating on the walls and ceilings of the basements of public buildings. This is not a particularly attractive look which is why it is placed in parts of the building that isn’t populated by frequent traffic. But the fire retardant qualities are particularly valuable.

A more acceptable looking method of protecting against a fire is a coating of intumescent paint used on the internal supporting beams. In addition to this you will find fire resistant materials covering pipes or other steel surfaces.

Passive fire protection doesn’t only refer to how the building is insulated or otherwise protected, it also refers to the fire doors and fire walls. Fire resistance rated walls are designed to sub-divide the building and contain a fire for a set period of time.

Part of a building’s passive fire protection involves the ease and means of allowing the occupants to escape. There must be the ability to close doors to protect oneself from a fire in another part of the building and then, in so doing, be able to escape out of a different exit route.

Fireproof cladding is one of the essential materials that make up a firewall and it can be made from such products as vermiculite, perlite, gypsum, intumescent epoxy, calcium silicate, MicroTherm or DuroSteel.

The greater the level of protection that is built into your building, the lower the risk of fire damage. Passive fire protection will also mean that your own personal safety will be assured.