Passive Fire

Every service that passes through a fire-rated wall or slab breaks the rating, and every one of those breaks has to be sealed with a system that has been tested to restore it. On a large job that is thousands of penetrations, each needing a product, a location, a photograph and somebody's name against it, and the whole set needing to be handed over as one certified record at the end.

Passive Fire is the tool for that. It sits on a library of tested systems, stamps them onto the project's drawings as pins, tracks each one from planned to as-built, and exports the compliance pack at handover.

The three things behind every pin

Getting this tool right is mostly a matter of keeping three ideas apart.

An element is what the penetration goes through: a 200mm concrete slab, a 75mm Hebel wall. It records what it is made of, how thick it is, whether it is load bearing, and the rating it is required to achieve.

A product is the material that does the sealing: a fire collar, a fire caulk, a pillow box.

A profile is a product applied through a particular kind of element, accommodating particular services, and the rating that combination has been tested to achieve. Profiles are what get stamped, because a profile is the only one of the three that is a complete answer.

So the check Teralo can make for you is between the element's required rating and the profile's achieved rating, and it is worth understanding what that check does and does not do.

FRL, REI and the other rating schemes

A rating is stored as three numbers in minutes, whatever your region calls them: structural adequacy, integrity and insulation. A blank means the component is not required, which is the honest state for a non-load-bearing wall rather than a zero.

That triplet maps onto the schemes in use around the world, and each row records which scheme its test evidence belongs to. Australian FRL, New Zealand FRR, European REI under EN 13501-2, American F and T ratings under ASTM E814, and Canadian F and FT under ULC-S115 are all supported side by side, because a real library legitimately mixes them: a product tested in Europe does not stop being tested when it arrives on an Australian job.

When you stamp a profile whose rating falls short of what the element requires, or whose rating was tested to a scheme that cannot be compared component by component with the element's, Teralo warns rather than blocks. That is deliberate. Performance solutions and engineering judgements exist, and a tool that refused them would just be worked around. The warning has to be acknowledged with a note, and the acknowledgement is kept with the installation, so the judgement is part of the record rather than a silence.

Where the library comes from

Elements, products and profiles exist at three levels, and the point of the arrangement is that nobody types a tested system in twice.

There is a public database curated centrally, an organisation library belonging to your organisation, and project-level additions for the one-off that only this job needs.

Adopting something from the public database into your library can be done two ways, and the difference matters. Referencing keeps a live link, so a correction made centrally reaches you. Forking takes an editable copy, which is what you want when your organisation needs to change something, at the cost of it no longer updating.

A project can then whitelist the profiles it will actually use. Leave the whitelist empty and every profile in the organisation library is available; fill it in and the stamping picker narrows to the ones the fire engineer signed off, which on a job with a large library is the difference between a two-second choice and a two-minute one.

Drawings and stamping

A drawing is registered for stamping from the project's existing Documents. There is no separate upload for passive fire, which is what keeps the stamped drawing and the current drawing the same document, and a drawing can be tied to a location so progress rolls up per level or per building.

Stamping places a pin at a point on a page, and the record behind that pin owns its own position rather than the annotation owning it. That sounds like an implementation detail and is not: it means the pins survive a drawing revision. When a new revision is issued the pins carry forward rather than being lost with the sheet they were drawn on.

Each installation gets a number, shown as PF-0001 by default, and records its profile, its element, the actual service passing through, its location and a free-text location reference of your own.

The trade doing the work registers its own drawings and stamps its own installations, so a fire-stopping subcontractor works on their sheets rather than on everybody's. The host organisation sees the whole project.

The lifecycle

An installation moves through four states:

1. Planned, stamped on the drawing before anybody has been to site
2. Installed, the work is done, with photographs
3. Reviewed, checked by somebody other than the installer
4. As built, finalised into the certification record

Planned records are created in bulk, often thousands at a time, and they carry no workflow until the first person marks one installed. That is what keeps the tool usable at the scale it has to work at.

Two things can hold a record up on purpose. A failed review bounces it back to installed and raises a linked observation, and neither the review nor the finalisation can complete while that defect is still open. And where the project has set a minimum photograph count, the transition will not go through until the photographs are there.

Deleting an installation is a soft delete, restorable in a batch, because a certification record that can be destroyed by a mis-click is not a certification record.

Handover

The point of all of it is the pack at the end. Passive Fire exports a compliance report, a handover pack and key plans over whatever slice of the register you select.

A handover export can be signed. Signing captures the signer's name, title and company, an optional certifier block, the wording of the compliance statement, the signature itself and a snapshot of exactly what was in scope at the time. That snapshot is what makes the export reproducible: the same pack can be regenerated later and match, which is the whole value of signing it in the first place. Signing off a handover pack is a host organisation act.

SettingsHost only

Tools, then Passive Fire at project level sets the defaults the register runs on: the rating standard new rows are written in and the register displays, the minimum photograph counts gating the installed and as-built transitions (zero means no gate, and photographs stay optional), the canned notes offered when writing up an installation, the title printed on exported stickers, and the numbering prefix.

The same page at organisation level is where the library is curated: adopting from the public database, forking what needs editing, and writing the organisation's own products, elements and profiles. See Organisation level and project level and The tools catalogue.

PermissionsHost only

Five permissions, and unusually three of them are the lifecycle rather than the usual view, create, manage split:

• Can view passive fire shows the register, the drawings and the library
• Can stamp and plan passive fire installations allows placing pins
• Can mark passive fire installations as installed is the installer's permission
• Can review passive fire installations is the reviewer's, and should not be the same people
• Can manage passive fire installations and tool settings allows everything, including finalising to as-built and configuring the tool

Marking an installation installed is restricted to the organisation that owns it, on top of the permission, so one trade cannot sign off another's work by accident. Reviewing is not so restricted, because reviewing somebody else's work is the point of reviewing. See How permissions work.

WorkflowsHost only

Unlike most tools here, binding a workflow is optional. Leave it unbound and the lifecycle still runs, driven entirely by the buttons on the record. That is the right default for a tool whose records are created in the thousands by trades who may never open a workflow builder.

Bind one and the same lifecycle gains the review and finalisation steps as real assigned work, with the reviewer drawn from the review permission and the finaliser from the manage permission. The two guards described above, the open-defect block and the minimum photograph count, apply either way. See Binding a workflow to a tool.