Protecting Colchester's new £14 million stadium
Loughborough-based Clymac Fire and Security Systems has played a role in a multi-million pound project to build a new stadium in Colchester.
The brand-new 10,000 seater community stadium will provide a new home for the town's football team, Colchester United. It will also be the foundation for an range of community, sporting and social activities for all of the residents of Colchester and the surrounding areas.
The site will also contain over 600 parking spaces and five mini football pitches, and will ultimately offer a variety of sports, leisure and business facilities, including hospitality suites.
As part of the £14m project, Clymac was given full responsibility for the design, installation, testing and handover of the entire fire protection system for the stadium.
The project was designed to be a quick build with a fixed end date. The stadium also needed a combined voice evacuation and public address system, which posed a number of challenges acoustically.
The solution Clymac came up with included a distributed PAVA rack system connected by fire-rated fibre optic cables. Automatic fire detection was put in place around the stadium via a network of control panels. The project has now been successfully completed and the football club moved into the stadium in July 2008.
Recommended Reading

Why electrical systems must be designed to fail safely
Electrical resilience is tested when things go wrong, not when they run smoothly, argues Cressall Resistors' Mike Torbitt.

Retrofitting is no longer just about sustainability
Rising costs and aging systems make retrofitting urgent, says Schneider Electric's Alice Williams. The answer isn't always wholesale replacement.

Why green technology demands a new approach to electrical safety
As buildings generate, store and consume power in new ways, Richard Winter explores why electrical safety needs to evolve with electrification.
