Anthony D. Parfitt, Chairman & Founder of Ci Global, explains how Intersec’s Best Passive Fire Safety Product award reflects a move from fire response to electrical fire prevention.
For decades, passive fire safety has meant static, built-in protection – systems and materials that sit quietly in the background, requiring no power, activation, or human intervention. Their purpose has not been to prevent fire from occurring, but to resist it once ignition has taken place – slowing spread, preserving structural integrity, and buying time for evacuation and response.
In practice, fire safety strategy has therefore focused on managing consequences rather than eliminating causes. Containment, evacuation, alarm, and suppression systems assume that risk cannot be removed entirely, and that safety begins only once smoke, heat, or flame is present. Prevention, where it exists, has largely been understood as good practice: correct installation, compliance with standards, and ongoing maintenance. That mindset has shaped the way buildings are designed and protected for generations.
The approach behind the award-winning system, Ci Safe, starts with a simple observation: a significant proportion of electrical fires originate locally – at sockets, plugs, and connection points where electricity is actively being used. Ci Safe is an intelligent fire and building safety system that continuously monitors electrical behaviour at those points of use.
When abnormal conditions emerge – such as excessive heat build-up or unsafe electrical patterns – power is automatically removed before ignition can occur. The system operates autonomously, without relying on human intervention, turning the socket itself into an active safety device rather than a passive termination point.
The Best Passive Fire Safety Product award at Intersec this year recognised a rethinking of a long-standing model. Not a rejection of traditional passive fire safety, but an extension of it – and the possibility that, for certain categories of fire risk, particularly electrical fires, safety no longer has to begin at the point of ignition.
The contradiction inside modern buildings
That shift matters because the buildings we are trying to protect have changed. Today’s buildings are electrically dense, digitally connected environments. Power flows continuously through sockets, devices, chargers, appliances, data infrastructure, and integrated building systems. Loads fluctuate constantly. Usage patterns evolve. Electrical systems are pushed harder, for longer, than at any time in the past.
Yet one of the most critical layers of protection remains rooted in a model developed for a far simpler, less electrically intensive era.
Much of fire safety strategy is still structured around a reactive sequence: wait for a fault to escalate, detect smoke or heat, trigger alarms, and respond. By the time those systems activate, energy has already been released in an uncontrolled way. At that point, prevention has given way to mitigation.
This creates a fundamental mismatch. Buildings are dynamic and increasingly complex, but protection against one of their most common sources of fire risk is still designed to intervene only once visible danger has emerged.
What the Intersec judges recognised is that this no longer has to be the case. Advances in sensing, autonomous decision-making, and edge-level control now make it possible to identify abnormal electrical behaviour where it most often begins – at the point of use – and to intervene before heat, smoke, or flame are present.
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