Objectives

37 high-rise towers owned and operated by Solihull Community Housing, providing residents with reliable, early warning fire detection and alarms. Since the incident in Grenfell Towers, the local authority in Solihull wanted to make fire prevention and safety a priority to better protect its residents in similar accommodation blocks, not because legislation told them that they had to but purely because they wanted to have their residents best interests at heart.

Working closely with the West Midlands Fire Service, the installer, Early Birds Fire Protection, specified Kentec’s K-Mesh system both for its reliability and practicality. Some 2,000 apartments needed protecting across a five-mile radius. As a wireless system, it was quick and easy to install, with minimum disruption to local residents and cost to the housing association. The system comprises some 4,000 sensors linked to a combination of Kentec’s award winning Taktis panels and Syncro AS analogue control panels, which are in turn linked to an alarm monitoring station.

“The advanced nature of K-Mesh means that the system is fully expandable, and future-proof, able to protect residents in large residential blocks now, and in the future,” he explains. “Nothing on this size and scale has ever been installed before and its open protocol and ability to integrate with a full range of technologies – including the sprinkler systems – takes the concept of fire detection and safety to another level.”