Question:
Can anyone help me with this one!

I work in the uk fire alarm installation buisiness, however I have been requested by an American company to provide an F.M. approved, UL listed control panel, which also complies to BS5839 pt4. After consultation with my suppliers, who also export to the US, they say there is no such animal because of the conflicts between the US & UK Standards.

However, 2 of my competitors say they can supply such a panel, which leaves me at a bit of a loss!

Can anyone shed light on this subject or possibly let me know the differences between the UK & US standards in respect to control panels.

Answer: In the UK there is no absolute requirements for LPCB (Loss Prevention Certification Board) certification. Instead most players in the UK market is able to get around this simply by stating that the fire alarm equipment complies with the relevant British Standards without having to actually having had the equipment tested by LPC (Loss Prevention Council) or any other recognised test labs.

Most of the serious fire alarm companies will have had their equipment both tested by LPC and certified by LPCB, but many don't ever bother to do that. There are many reasons for that, for example that it is very expensive to do the tests and get the equipement certified and also that LPCB requires the company to have a documented QA system that follows the ISO 9000 standards.

Getting equipment certified in the UK (as in the rest of Europe) is a costly business and requires that the company that develop and manufacture the equipment have the financial resources to go through with it. Many of the smaller manufacturers simply don't have the money to do that.

At this time there is a new set of European standards that are coming through for fire alarm equipment. This is the EN-54 standard. This standard is made up of many parts that covers different types of equipment (e.g. part 2 the control panel, part 4 the power supply, etc.) Some of these parts have already been agreed by all countries (including the UK) while others are now in the final stages of becoming a full blown standard. When this happens all Europena countries will have the same standards and the national standards, such as BS5839 part 4 will either have to be exactly the same as the relevant part of the EN-54 standard or scrapped altogether.

The new European standards should also in theory make it possible to have the equipment tested by a lab in for example Denmark and then have the equipment certified in all other European countries based on that test. In practice things don't work that way yet. Germany, France and the UK which are the main contries in this work have managed to get so many "options with requirements" included in the standard that it is virtually impossible to get a fire alarm panel to comply with all of them at the same time. Unfortunately this means that unless an awful lot of work is put down in the development phase the panel is unlikely to be acceptable in all of these countries even though it complies with all the requirements in the EN-54 standard that the UK require.

Still there are some positive developments. VdS (Germany), CNPP (France) and the LPC have all agreed to recognise each others work. This then means that a short cut have been created for getting equipment that for example have been tested in the UK by LPC according to the relevant EN-54 parts can be approved by the VdS in Germany without needing to be re-tested in Germany. So far this works best for detectors and equipment like that as there are few, if any, "options with requirements" for this type of equipment. For the fire alarm panels themselves it is still a problem that although VdS will recognise the work carried out by LPC or CNPP they still require the panel to have all the special options included that they have managed to get included into EN-54 part 2.

The main difference between the UK and the rest of Europe (at least Northern Europe) is that there are absolute requirements for the equipment to have been tested and approved by a recognised body. It is not enough in these countries to simply state that the equipment complies with the requirements of the respective standards and approvals bodies as is so often done in the UK.