Out Of Hours Fire Safety

If a tree falls in the forest and nobody’s around to hear it, does it make a sound? By the same reckoning, if a fire alarm is set off in an unoccupied office out-of-hours and nobody’s around to react, is this the same as having no alarm at all?

A fire alarm sounding in an empty property is not going to be enough to alert business owners to a blaze on their premises, leaving them with a couple of options: they can either hire round-the-clock security personnel at great expense or, alternatively, can opt for out-of-hours fire safety equipment, such as RedCARE monitoring.

Who is Responsible?

It is the responsibility of the property or business owner to adequately protect their premises from fire, and to safeguard it as much as possible in the event of a blaze. Often, they will be the nominated ‘responsible person’ as specified in the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order, who is also in charge of both proactive (hazard identification, evacuation procedure testing, alarm testing etc.) and reactive (leading emergency evacuations, assembly point coordination etc.) fire safety on the premises.

This responsibility stretches to ensuring that sufficient safeguards are in place to alert those present at the site to the presence of a fire – and to alert keyholders in the event of a fire in an unoccupied building.

Gov.uk specifies that, as a business, “you must have a fire detection and warning system. You may need different types of detectors, depending on the type of building and the work carried out in it.”

How to Protect your Business

To ensure that your property remains safe at all times, some form of out-of-hours fire alarm system must be in place, and RedCARE presents the best option available.

RedCARE monitoring, a BT product, works by sending a signal to an Alarm Receiving Centre (ARC) should an alarm sound after hours at a premises. The ARC can then determine whether the alarm has been set off accidentally or is genuine and requires attention from the emergency services or the keyholder, contacting them immediately.

RedCARE utilises both landline and mobile networks to ensure that the signal does not fail before reaching ARC, keeping businesses safe whether an accidental fire breaks out or they experience an arson attack.

With the ARC monitoring each alarm, false alarms can be identified without the need for a keyholder to come out in the middle of the night to investigate. In many cases, the alarm can be silenced remotely after investigating whether a genuine fire is in progress.