Safety first
Certified fire protection solutions
When constructing buildings, the issue of fire protection is taken extremely seriously. At the end of the day, it is about protecting lives. Special attention is paid to the pipes here.
Building drainage systems have to be designed and installed in such a way that ensures that a fire cannot spread to an upper floor or across to a neighbouring flat. The critical areas are those points where the pipes are routed through ceilings and walls. The systems that protect these feed-throughs are therefore inspected as part of fire protection tests.
Perfectly sealed off
With pipe feed-throughs in concrete floors, a Geberit fire protection sleeve is placed around the discharge pipe and attached to the floor from below. Where pipes pass through a wall, such sleeves have to be attached from both sides. At temperatures in excess of around 150 °C, the sleeve’s intumescent material swells up. As plastic discharge pipes start melting or even burning relatively quickly when there is a fire, this intumescent material can tightly seal off the feed-throughs in the ceiling or wall before fire and smoke spread to other rooms or floors.
Fire protection tests are carried out at the officially certified Materials Testing Institute (MPA) University of Stuttgart and other facilities. The MPA Stuttgart has several special furnaces that can generate temperatures of over 1,000 °C for hours on end.