Why Should I have a service Plan?

For some, having another maintenance plan in place may seem like a hassle, or another unnecessary expense, but one thing to remember is that a fire alarm system within your building is a piece of life safety equipment.

Its purpose is to protect Life, Property or both, in the case of Life Category systems, a working fire alarm system should give the earliest warning of fire to enable occupants to escape from a building before the build up of smoke, flames or toxic gasses make the escape routes unusable.

So really the question should be, "Why wouldn't you want a fire alarm service plan in place"?

Knowing that your fire alarm system operates as intended, that any change of layout or use of the building isn't affecting the capability of the system to alert you in the event of a fire is the ultimate peace of mind for any building owner or management team.

What could go wrong?

As with anything in the built environment, products can degrade over time, become damaged, or become ineffective due to external influences, we have even seen an incident when a lightning strike near to a building travelled through to the fire alarm system and blew a loop driver... this stopped half of the system from being able to detect fire!

Having a service contract in place means that your system is going to be thoroughly inspected and tested at least twice a year, we'll run through what happens on a service visit in another post "What happens on a service visit"

If you are in any doubt about the competency of your fire alarm service and maintenance provider, its perhaps a good time to switch provider, maybe you don't even have a service plan in place yet?

Maybe you're not getting the service that you expect, for the price you expect from your existing provider?

Get in touch with our friendly team today and we'll talk you through what you should be getting and just how affordable it should be.

What are the rules?

For now though, if that didn't answer your question, there's obviously rules around fire safety too so we've covered some of the key requirements below (don't forget that your insurers, both building and liability will require this to be met as well as part of your insurance agreement)

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 says that:

"The responsible person must ensure that, where appropriate, the premises is equipped with appropriate fire detectors and alarms and that these are subject to a suitable system of maintenance and are maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair by a competent person."

The British Standards, BS 5839-1 says that periodic inspection and servicing needs to be carried out by a competent person with specialist knowledge of fire detection and alarm systems, including knowledge of the caused of false alarms, sufficient information regarding the system and adequate access to spares.

An agreement should also be in place for the emergency call-outs to deal with any fault or damage to the system within the required time.

For the system to be considered compliant, the period between successive visits by the Competent Person should not exceed a period of 6 months.

It is also worth remembering the obligations and duty of care placed on operators and business management to protect the users of their buildings through other relevant regulations and guidance.

How Can Liberty Systems Help?

Here at Liberty Systems we want to make sure that everyone has access to high quality service and maintenance for their fire alarm systems, that's why we offer a comprehensive service to all customers, detailed reporting to make it easy to show your system test history and modifications, easy to manage service bookings, our office simply contact you up to a month before your service is due, just to make sure the planned dates work for you.



You get access to our 24 hour phone support and call out engineers as well as free user training.

Oh... and because we believe that fire safety should be accessible to all, we offer very competitive pricing on our service plans too!

If you have any further questions or would like to discuss your system, Click Here to get in touch with our team today, they are always happy to help.