GS Global, a Mexico-based environmental engineering firm that has designed and maintained industrial ventilation systems for 23 years, set out to land on a fire suppression option for its’ clients who utilize dust collectors.
The clients themselves requested fire suppression options with safety and financial security as main drivers, said Edwin Arteaga, an application engineer with 13 years of experience at GS Global.
"The main reason is safety — the safety of your people, and that's the most valuable thing. For any plant, or any client, the concern is always the people first,” Arteaga said. “ A dust collector also isn't a small investment"
"There's no reason, when it comes to safety, to wait any longer. Waiting means exposing yourself that something happens to you — and nobody wants that."
After exploring available fire suppression options on the market, GS Global landed on Firetrace as the solution of choice.
In this blog post, Arteaga shares five reasons Firetrace landed on top:
Reaction time is the entire point for dust collectors. If a dust collector filter catches fire, it can and will quickly ignite the rest of the filters, escalating the problem in a matter of seconds.
"The main advantage is reaction time and its precision," Edwin said.
To explain why precision matters as much as speed, he walks through a scenario: "A dust collector with 60 cartridges. A spark is generated in the shop’s process, thrown outward, and our dust collector captures it along with the rest of the contaminants, carrying it through a duct and into the filter area,” Arteaga said. “That spark might cool off and extinguish on its own. Or it might not, and it lands on exactly one of those 60 cartridges inside the collector.”
That's the actual problem a suppression system must solve. “It must detect and respond to ignition at one specific point, fast enough so that it does not become a bigger event,” Arteaga said.
A system that only activates automatically is a system with a single point of failure.
"Firetrace systems can be activated two ways. One is automatic — the tubing installed near points that are susceptible to combustion detects the temperature and releases the extinguishing agent,” Arteaga said. “The other is manual. If for some reason the system doesn't activate on its own and there's a person nearby, they can activate the same system by pushing the release."
A suppression system's job doesn't end when the fire goes out. The aftermath will determine how much the event actually cost you.
"A Firetrace system, if it activates in an event, can be replaced in minutes,” Arteaga said. “If you have a reserve of tubing and a replacement cylinder, you can have your system protected and operational again in under an hour."
For a plant, that's the difference between a fire being a footnote and a fire being a production crisis. "Process continuity isn't affected for long — that's very valuable to clients."
People choose Firetrace because of the value the system has to offer. A high quality, automatic fire suppression system that offers protection to your operations, your assets, and your people. No human intervention is needed. No electricity required. True 24/7 protection.
"The price of these systems, compared to the level of protection and security they provide — honestly, the benefits outweigh the cost, both for the equipment and its installation and maintenance," Arteaga said.
“With Firetrace, we've been at this for more than 10 years, maybe as many as 15,” Arteaga said. “We still believe that Firetrace is the best system available to protect dust collectors."
Any system can look good on a spec sheet. But for GS Global, Arteaga said, Firetrace has over a decade of limiting damage in real dust collector fire incidents.
Learn more about dust collector fire protection here.
Edwin Arteaga is an application engineer and 13-year team member at GS Global, an environmental engineering firm specializing in industrial ventilation and pollutant control, and an Authorized Firetrace Partner located in Mexico.
Original interview conducted in Spanish and translated to English.