Fire suppression born in a rail depot, now hanging in living rooms

Chemicals and locomotives first. Looks came much later.

SAPFIR systems were built for industry, chemical production and rail maintenance machines. Nobody there cared what a module looked like. They cared whether the fire was out within five seconds.

The reason was simple. A fire on a rail machine usually ends in a total loss: rebuilding a burnt-out locomotive means roughly two years out of service, and repairing one rail grinder came to about €3.5 million. Chemicals are much the same — at Synthesia Pardubice it's cable ducts and munitions stores, at CRH it's spontaneous ignition in lime and adhesive production, where water and foam are no use and would freeze solid anyway.

Most sites came to us after something else had failed them. Škoda Auto approached the manufacturer after a fire in its engine plant, where gas suppression didn't hold up. Hyundai came after a robotic line fire that ran into millions. Nidec had two furnaces curing rotors at up to 180 °C — the gas system failed to put the fire out and destroyed itself in the process. The plant director put the saving from the autonomous prototype at over €1 million.

Homes came last, and they forced a redesign. You cannot hang a red canister from a flat's ceiling, so we hid it inside the light fitting. A suppression lamp replaces the existing ceiling light, works as an ordinary LED lamp, and starts extinguishing above 72 °C. The 2.8 model can sit recessed in a plasterboard ceiling, so after a fire you swap the cartridge instead of taking the ceiling apart.