Hi Everyone, can anyone please comment as a sanity check to settle an office discussion?
Paragraphs 3.9.3 and 3.13.1 of C/AS2 as they relate to a SMOE building are the cause of this discussion. 3.13.1 e) clearly requires smoke lobbies before the VSP (sprinklered or not) whereas 3.9.3 b) says you don’t need lobbies if the building is sprinklered. Now, 3.13.1 should take preference over 3.9.3 for a SMOE surely? and if we ignore all of 3.9.3 for a SMOE building, we can’t use 3.9.3 d) and so you need a smoke lobby AND a horizontal safe path?! (3 smoke control doors from the apartment to the VSP stairwell). Going back to ‘first principles’ and thinking of C/VM2 analyses we’ve done, surely a smoke lobby and a HSP are overkill and the HSP can double as the smoke lobby as the ‘air lock’ functionality is provided by two smoke control doors between the apartments and VSP, i.e. we can ‘invoke’ 3.9.3 d) - this seems the most pragmatic interpretation to me, is this normal/best practice in everyone else’s experience??
Thanks in advance for your help.
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Hi Rob.
Being acronym impaired it took me a while to figure SMOE but then all became clear!
Its not worded the best and I asked a similar question back in the DBH days. Essentially 3.13 applies to SMOE buildings with a list of must requirements whereas 3.9.3 applies to ALL buildings with a list of either/or requirements.
A horizontal safe path satisfies the definition of a smoke lobby
Regards, Bruce
Cheers Bruce! and apologies for lazy acronym use. I thought as much, but nice to have a 2nd opinion.