Fire Alarms for Warehouses

Warehouses are one of the most the most operations-critical parts of a company. It’s where you store your valuable stock and constantly work to meet customers expectations. Any disruption to your operations here, can have far reaching impacts on customer satisfaction and your brand’s reputation.

Your warehouse is probably also packed from floor to ceiling with flammable materials. It doesn’t matter whether you’re selling goods that don’t burn – the cardboard and plastic packaging they’re wrapped in will burn very well! If your goods are mounted on pallets, or you have wooden shelves on your racks then these are a fire risk as well….

That’s why it’s essential to have a fire alarm that will quickly detect a fire, and won’t result in constant false alarms. There are lots of great fire detection solutions that are ideal for warehousing applications, but make sure that the option you choose won’t cause you problems down the line!

Point type detectors are often the cheapest option, but:
- Don’t use smoke detectors in a dusty warehouse, or above 10.5m.
- Don’t use heat detectors above 7.5m (or 9.5m for an A1 detector). Even then, heat detectors could take a while to activate.
High Sensitivity Smoke Detection (HSSD) is a great choice, especially in a cold storage warehouse. Just make sure you’ve got suitable dust filtration to prevent false alarms. If properly designed and installed they can be really simple to maintain.
Beam Detectors are ideal for large and high level applications. They may not be the best choice if it’s prone to be dusty.
Linear Heat Detection Cable is ideal for protecting warehouse racking.
Video Smoke Detection (see image below) is a superb choice for high-speed detection of high level risk areas. With high bay warehousing, there is a risk of smoke stratification, which occurs when the rising smoke reaches a different temperature level in the high building. Instead of rising, the smoke flattens out and may never reach a ceiling mounted smoke detection system. Video smoke detection overcomes this risk, by detecting the smoke as soon as it becomes visible to the camera.