Vehicle & Plant Fire Suppression Systems

Any Vehicle, such as buses and Heavy Plant machinery are a high fire risk.  The strain of constant operation, continual vibration and the potential accumulation of dirt (all combined with the abundant supply of fuel and potential ignition sources) creates a unique fire risk that requires unique solutions. Therefore, it is extremely important to have the necessary fire suppression on your operations-critical assets.

Standards & Accreditation’s for Mobile Fire Suppression

Currently, the UK does not have a standard for vehicle/plant machinery fire protection.  As a result, the only authoritative arbiter of system quality and suitability is your insurance company, who often aren’t technically minded anyway.

The absence of any recognized and reputable standard has led to a situation where systems available are a world apart in terms of specification and quality, with the good, bad and ugly all available on the marketplace.  Systems without even basic vibration testing are being installed on equipment worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.  Just because it’s cheap, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s good value.

FM Global Approval Standard 5970 – Heavy Duty Mobile Equipment Protection Systems.  

This standard was launched during 2016, and at present all of the leading fire suppression manufacturers are going through the testing process.  This standard covers the use of liquid agent fire suppression systems, which is the category that most modern systems fall into.  The previous FM standard focused on Dry Chemical systems so isn’t relevant to most installations that occur today.

Swedish SBF Standards for Plant Machinery (SBF-127) and Road Going Vehicles (SBF-128).

These standards have their critics, but we recommend using them as a reference. At present they are about as good as you’ll get as a level playing field for comparing system specifications against each other.  The standards have been in place for over 35 years, and have been adopted by many other nations since.

The most important factor they allow you to consider is the amount of extinguishing agent.

• For construction, and general plant machinery you need 3lt Foam/Wet Agent, OR 5kg of Dry Powder for every cubic metre of protected engine bay volume.
• For high risk unmanned materials processing equipment such as shredders, screeners and crushers, you need 6lt Foam/Wet Agent OR 10kg of Dry Powder for every cubic metre of protected engine bay volume.

This basic formula will help you to compare the systems you are offered, to see whether the size of system specified is realistic for the size of your machine.

Click here to download our free guide for vehicle fire safety, or check out the products below for more information.