When presented with a project requiring a gas suppression installation which standard should you reference?
The difference between these two standards is in the title SANS 14520 – Gaseous Fire extinguishing systems and SANS 246 – Fire protection of electronic installations.
If your application is for a computer room, server room, telecoms room you should consider utilising SANS 246. If your application is for a substation, paper archive, storeroom, museum or similar you will select SANS 14520 in combination with SANS 369 and SANS 10139 for your design and installation.
The problem arises in that not ALL rooms housing electronic equipment automatically fall into SANS 246.
Prior to 2015 SANS 246 covered ALL electronic areas with risk categories A to E providing direction for Slight risk areas and Low risk areas – small electronic offices, CAD offices, small to medium business, commercial departments operator areas of Call Centres etc, all the way through to extremely high-risk areas such as traffic control centres and major IT server hubs.
In 2015 SABS issued a revised version of SANS 246 dropping categories A and B and concentrating on Categories for Medium, High, and Critical risks covering dedicated equipment rooms with central server facilities, these would be main IT facilities within large companies, major telecoms facilities or production control computer rooms up to critical risks such as financial dealer operations, internet hoisting centres nuclear plant control facilities.
To determine which route to take, the designer or installer, must assess the risk to the client should he lose his computer room to fire. From this
assessment one can now choose to go the SANS 14520 route or the SANS 246 route baring in mind the requirements of SANS 246 are far more onerous.
In summary if you are faced with a small server room in an office complex, a small PABX room or any area not housing electronic equipment stick with SANS 14520 and associated standards.
On the other hand, if this is the main computer room for a major retailer or a production computer room for a large production house one must now reference SANS 246.
The choice is yours.
