Fire stopping in High Wycombe
School work belongs in the holidays. Here is how we plan it.
Get a priceA school has quiet weeks and busy ones, and the work goes in the quiet ones.
That means short windows. Six weeks in summer, a week at Christmas, a week at Easter and the half-terms. If your site manager has a list of gaps, the job is to fit it into the time.
If you run a school or college in High Wycombe, plan backwards from the date the pupils return.
Why survey first
A school is made of wings added at different times. One wing may date from the sixties and another from the last decade. The walls between classrooms, the corridor and the plant room can all be different.
A compartmentation survey done in term time, from the corridors and above ceilings, gives you a list and a count. You can then price the sealing and book it for the holiday.
Doing it that way keeps the work in the holiday instead of spending it looking.
What we usually find
IT cabling through walls between classrooms, added when the network went in.
Pipes through the plant room and kitchen walls.
The gap at the top of a partition where the ceiling void runs on above it.
Old openings left from a refurbishment.
Planning a holiday job
Tell us the dates the school is empty and the areas we can have.
We agree a start date and a finish date. The aim is to leave the building as you gave it, with ceiling tiles back and floors clear.
We keep dust inside the work area. Anything that might get into a corridor is sheeted.
Sign in and out follows your rules. Tell us what the site team needs from us.
What you get
Each seal photographed, labelled and listed against the survey numbers.
A short plan of the areas, with the seals marked, for the file.
That is what an assessor or insurer asks for. A school can lose it in a change of site manager, so we send it as one document.
The administrative side
High Wycombe is in Buckinghamshire, so the council is Buckinghamshire Council and fire safety is enforced by Buckinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service. If the school is an academy or part of a trust, the trust's estates team may need to sign the work off.
We come from Luton. Our BM TRADA / FIRAS-certificated contractors do the sealing.
Questions we get asked
Can you work during term time?
For small jobs outside teaching areas, sometimes. Tell us what you want.
Do you check the sealing against the fire strategy?
We work from your assessor's report or survey list. The fire strategy is for your designer.
Tell us what is going through it and what the wall is made of. We will come back with a price.
Get a price