Let's delve deeper into passive fire protection and its mechanics, drawing from our journey in gathering insights for advancing Agnitek M-Wrap in Australia and New Zealand.
To obtain data to further guide the Agnitek M-Wrap product development for Australian and New Zealand markets.
Qualitative research through in-depth interviews.
The data was collected through in-depth interviews with PFP installers and specifiers.
Two interview questionnaires (one for specifiers and one for installers) were created to cover all relevant information the researcher expected to obtain.
All in-depth interviews were conducted online.
Let's explore the current industry practices of passive fire protection in Australia by examining the comments provided by our interviewees.
Did you know that…?
Interviewee 1
In Queensland: In new build we do it as part of our consultancy. If we're engaged in a building, we'll work everything out, get it all pre-approved.
In New South Wales they are now doing it a bit like the Auckland Council, where you have to specify everything going into the building before they'll get the approval.
So New South Wales is slightly different. The rest of the states are more the same: once they start needing some passive fire, they start thinking about it. So it's really not very pre-emptive at all other than New South Wales, so…
So if we are on a high rise and most of our stuff is a multi-residential high rise, that's what we do predominantly. Um, we would go to all the sub-trades and say, “What products do you normally use?”
And then we might try and do a bit of rationalization. So if, you know, you might get, you know, someone wants TBA, someone wants Promat, you know, Trafalgar, Boss, the gamut of them. Um, and we just try and rationalize that a little bit. Can we all use one cork so we're not specifying 22 different types of cork? Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Um, and so we would do that as part of our gig. And so we're not specifying necessarily; we're just confirming what they want to use is okay. So it's a slightly different way.
In New South Wales, we get involved in a few now where they're saying, here are the drawings. We need to put all the systems in there. So we'll pick a brand, like a Trafalgar or a Promat or Boss or whatever it might be.
In that, in that scenario? Yes. It's in our, it's up for us in the other. So we, so we have really two different ways of doing it. One is this is what we're gonna do and you know, predominantly all the plumbers are using Snap collars. It pretty much has the market. So we would specify Snap collars 'cause that's what they want to use. Um, and then, then we'd go through the various trades and say, you know, what's the most likely when we're specifying we'll get the plumber or the air conditioning guy might say, here are all the products we like using. And we might go, you know what, that's a costly way of doing it. There's a, cheaper way, but we're not aligned to any manufacturer, so we don't really care. Um, it's probably more from our point of view is more what's easier to inspect.
To Be Continued…
