Five innovations for buildings' revolution: The path to effective fire safety in buildings

A key to this holistic approach is understanding how the shifts in electrical consumption and increased load requirements impact the fire safety of both new and older buildings. An estimated 25% of fires are caused by electrical failures or obsolete, overloaded installations. And this statistic worsens in emerging markets where 80% of building fires are due to non-compliant cables.

Electrical cables are the backbone of buildings. The typical office building houses more than 200 kilograms of electrical cables per 100 square meters. Despite their omnipresence, they are unfortunately often forgotten. In older buildings, this can and often does lead to negligence in retrofitting outdated electrical cables and systems to ensure modern safety standards are met. And, with increasing electricity demand, installations in older buildings are often undersized and thus increase the risk of electrical fires.

Fire safety starts with a holistic approach to certification

Today, most standards and certification bodies focus on validating each component in isolation. This lack of a holistic view of the interactions between electrical components within a building structure must be a concern within the industry. Fortunately, frameworks aim to identify the components that must work together to minimize fire risk.

Changing the industry mindset from the certification of each component to consider the interactions of components is fundamental to ensuring their compatibility and overall safety. This holistic and systems approach ensures that proper testing is done to validate that the overall system performance is achieved and certified. And that testing takes into account the usage of components in a real-life setting.

Nexans' Fire Safety compatibility approach

Nexans aims to provide the highest electrical and fire safety levels by ensuring its cables and wires combat fire propagation, reduce smoke and hazardous emissions during a fire, and maintain the continuous operation of fire safety systems. These are the fundamental pillars of Nexans' Fire Safety solutions and services.

Our mission to provide innovative products and solutions that meet the safety needs of our customers extends to our dedication to moving the industry to systems compatibility testing and certification. This is an increasingly important opportunity to ensure the fire safety of new solutions.