With more than 70 premises across England, Big Yellow Self Storage is one of the UK’s leading providers of self storage, student storage and business storage solutions. The company’s storage facilities vary in complexity and size and Big Yellow has enlisted the expertise of FDS Consult to provide a full fire strategy for the more intricate buildings, along with a complete fire risk assessment of all its storage
facilities.
A good example of the ways in which FDS Consult’s knowledge and experience has helped Big Yellow Self Storage to reduce costs and improve safety is the work undertaken at the company’s Fulham facility. Here, FDS Consult provided Big Yellow Self Storage with significant cost savings at the design stages of its latest premises thanks to the team’s value engineering expertise and innovative approach to developing the fire strategy. The project involved the renovation of an eight-storey former power station and the architectural design involved maintaining the building’s original, Victorian, 15-metre high glazed front façade.
FDS Consult took a creative approach to developing the fire strategy for the building and achieved cost reductions, increased useable floor space and improved safety whilst maintaining the architect’s vision by:
- Providing equivalence to four hours’ fire compartmentation throughout the building to enable the Victorian glazed front façade to be retained – a first for an industrial storage building.
- Justifying the omission of sprinklers by using smoke and temperature modelling.
- Reducing venting, which saved costs and space.
- The result was a storage facility that not only provided substantial cost savings but also increased the building’s useable floor space by 2,568 sq ft, increasing the potential profitability of the unit. Thanks to FDS Consult’s knowledge and experience, the project successfully achieved compliance with the London Building Act Section 20, which demands higher standards of safety.
- The Fulham project is just one example of the value engineering and fire safety expertise that FDS Consult has provided to Big Yellow Self Storage, with significant cost savings being typical across all fire strategies developed for the company. FDS Consult has also worked closely with the
Self Storage Association (SSA) to write a design guide that will help improve levels of fire safety throughout the entire industry.
