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After years ,(40 years as building was built in 1980),of ‘Pass’ reports for our fire hose reels in our small apartment block we have suddenly been told that they no longer ‘comply’ with current standards and need to be fixed. The report alone to find a solution will cost $8K (!)and then we have to find the money to do whatever they say to fix the problem. I know that apartment blocks have the choice of fire hydrants or fire hose reels and we wanted to just buy fire hydrants and not use the hose reels. Strata manager says because the reels are there they must be made to comply and is not looking for a solution for us. Does anyone know what the rules are? Can we just lock up the fire reels and get fire hydrants? Just because the reels no longer comply do we really need to upgrade? Wouldn’t that mean that every building with reels should be upgrading? (the issue is the distance between the valve and the rim of the reel). Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. thank you.
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our 8 flat complex in Melbourne has just gone through a similar situation. In our case we wanted new letterboxes as the old letterboxes were inbuilt to a leaking retaining wall.
When part of the garden was cleared – a leak was discovered on the rusted steel pipe. The plumber advised that we needed to replace the pipe which extended under cement in front of the car park ($9000) However we found the nearest fire hydrant and it seemed it met the regulations of hose length from hydrant to all apartments.
This did cost $9000 but it did mean that we did not have to tear up the cement.it also I meant a lot of ringing around all the responsible bodies to try and understand what were the regulations etc. If i as an owner and on the committee had to be paid for the hours I spent it would have cost a lot more!
Short answer is you need to be up to code for fire stuff.
Long answer is you are at risk of being taken advantage of by “fire consultants” who are also in the business of providing fire upgrades or get kick backs from referring strata’s to particular companies.
We went through something similar in Sydney, small old building. A couple of fire companies quoted upwards of $100k to bring the building up to current code (ie: all the bells and whistles as per a new build).
However some fairly close scrutiny on what the actual minimum requirements were (on top of what was already there) brought this down to around $12k – which was upgrading one of the pumps and connecting smoke detectors to a back-to-base monitoring service.
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