Southsea Castle

The Challenge

Southsea Castle has long since been using Apollo products to ensure optimum safety for visitors and staff alike. Due to its location – a handful of meters from the Solent - walls and ceilings are often damp and condensation can easily form. This means that water ingress is a challenge that any detector in this environment needs to overcome.

The Solution

Water ingress has posed significant challenges to the preservation of the historic site. Where there had been many wired devices in the castle’s fire loop, each device added a termination in the loop cable. Increased terminations allowed for more chances of short circuits due to perpetuality-damp surroundings. It is this number of terminations that also made for identifying subsequent short circuits and faults even more difficult. Fusion didn’t oversee the previous installation, but when they first attended the site they could tell the old system was in desperate need of updating, and numerous junction boxes needed to be removed due to years of exposure to harsh conditions. The decision was made to transition to wireless detectors, which can operate independently of vulnerable wiring to reduce the number of terminations in the fire cable. This provides a more reliable solution that minimises the risk of damage from both water and electrical failures. 

The construction of the castle is not typically suited for wireless installation due to the thickness of the walls, which vary anywhere between 30cm to over 1m thick. Fusion utilised our REACH Wireless Survey Kit to identify the best possible signal, with multiple REACH Loop-Interfaces used to provide optimum wireless coverage for the entire site, despite the challenging construction. Fusion made use of the wide range of available radio-frequency (RF) channels to add the large number of wireless products required, without signal clashing.

Any requests to drill holes or install additional containment had to be approved by English Heritage, which added another layer of complexity to the project. For the new cabling, Fusion made every effort to use existing fixings and holes where possible, with any new holes restricted to drilling only in the mortar joints in accordance with preservation requirements.

In addition to REACH, Apollo’s previous wireless fire solution, XPander, was also present onsite and had been working reliably for multiple years. Portsmouth City Council did not wish to replace the XPander devices, so Fusion utilised Apollo’s RF Channel Map from apollo-fire.com to ensure proper RF channel spacing was maintained between this solution and REACH Wireless. In total, Fusion replaced 39 hard-wired devices for REACH and XPander, adding an additional 5 REACH devices to the loop.