Fire Stopping in New South Wales: Records That Survive an Independent Assessor

First, what does not apply here

Most fire-stopping software you will read about is British, and it is sold on the “golden thread” — a duty created by the UK Building Safety Act 2022. That Act is English legislation. It imposes no obligation whatsoever on a contractor in Sydney or Newcastle.

We are a British company and we could easily wave the same flag at you. It would be worth nothing on your job. What matters on your job is the tested system behind each seal, and — in New South Wales — the certificate that lets the building be occupied and the annual statement that keeps it that way.

And a second thing that does not apply: the rest of Australia. Building regulation here is state-based. We have read the New South Wales regulation and we have not read Victoria’s, Queensland’s, Western Australia’s, South Australia’s, Tasmania’s, the ACT’s or the Northern Territory’s. This page is New South Wales. If you work elsewhere, the principle below probably travels — but do not take the detail from us until we have done the same work on your state.

The chain that actually decides whether your work stands up

NCC Volume One, Section C, requires a service penetration through a fire-rated element to maintain that element’s FRL. The FRL does not come from the product tin. It comes from a system tested as a complete assembly, to the test standards the NCC calls up.

We are not going to quote those standard numbers at you. They are paywalled, and nobody here has read them. Plenty of software marketing cites them anyway, on the strength of a blog post — ask anyone who does exactly which clause they are relying on. What you can read for yourself, free, is the NCC: Section C carries Part C4 on the protection of openings and Specification 13 on the penetration of walls, floors and ceilings by services.

“As a complete assembly” is the phrase that decides everything. The test covers a particular service type, a particular penetrant size, a particular gap, a particular substrate and a particular construction. Change any one of them on site and the tested system no longer describes what you installed — and the evidence no longer covers you.

So the defensible record is not “we used the right product”. It is, for every single penetration:

• The tested system claimed for it, and the product within that system
• The substrate it went into, and the services passing through it
• Photographs before it was closed up, because after that nobody can see it again
• Who installed it, and when
• And evidence that none of the above has been changed since

Why the New South Wales frame suits this better than the British one

This is worth saying plainly, because it is the real argument. The UK golden thread is a whole-of-life information duty — keep a live model of the building. The New South Wales equivalent is certification and annual attestation: at some point a certifier or an accredited practitioner has to be willing to put their name to the statement that an installed measure performs as it was designed to.

That person was not there when you sealed it. They cannot open the wall. What they can do is read your record — and either trust it or not. A per-seal record that a stranger can verify, and that visibly cannot have been edited after the fact, is worth more under an attestation regime than under an information one.

New South Wales, specifically — and your trade is named in it

The Environmental Planning and Assessment (Development Certification and Fire Safety) Regulation 2021 requires a fire safety certificate before occupation and an Annual Fire Safety Statement thereafter. Clause 79(4) sets out the statutory fire safety measures in a Table. These entries are ours, in the regulation’s own words:

• Fire seals protecting openings in fire-resisting components of the building
• Fire dampers
• Fire doors
• Smoke dampers
• Smoke doors

The fire safety schedule must specify those measures for the building (cl 79(1)) and must cover the whole building, not merely the part under the consent (cl 79(2)).

The rule that decides how good your records have to be

The assessment provisions require that the person carrying out the assessment “must inspect and verify the performance of each essential fire safety measure being assessed” — and, critically, that they “must not have installed a fire safety measure being assessed”.

Read that twice, because it is stronger than anything in the UK regime. The person who signs your work off cannot be you. Every year, for the life of the building, an independent accredited practitioner has to look at what you installed — usually long after it was closed up — and be willing to put their own accreditation behind it.

A folder of phone photos does not survive that. A per-seal record carrying the location, the product, the date, the photographs taken before close-up and proof that none of it has been edited since, does.

What we have not checked, and will not pretend to know

We would rather tell you the edges of what we know than have you find them yourself:

• We have read the New South Wales regulation. We have not read the Victorian, Queensland, WA, SA, Tasmanian, ACT or NT regimes. Treat this page as New South Wales only.
• We have not read the line-by-line content requirements for an Annual Fire Safety Statement. The Table above and the assessor wording are quoted from the regulation; the AFSS detail we have taken no view on.
• We will not tell you what record-retention period you personally owe as a subcontractor. That depends on your contract and your certifier, not on us.
• We have seen it claimed that a servicing standard imposes a seven-year on-site retention duty on installers. We could not confirm that against the standard itself, so we do not repeat it as fact. If someone sells you software on that basis, ask them where in the standard it says so.

FRLs, not EI ratings

Software written for the UK market tends to default to EI notation — EI 60, EI 120 — which comes from the European classification standard. You work in FRLs, expressed as structural adequacy / integrity / insulation in minutes.

In Assaya the rating list is a per-workspace setting, not a fixed British picklist, so an Australian workspace records FRLs in the form your certifier expects. The same is true of work types, services, substrates and materials.

Where Assaya fits

Assaya is built by a working fire-stopping contractor. Your crew photographs each seal on site as it goes in — on a phone, offline, because basements and risers have no signal. Each record carries its reference, its position on the drawing, the tested system, the substrate and the time.

Every record is written into a hash-chained register: each entry seals the one before it, so if anything is altered afterwards the chain breaks and says so. When the certifier or the head contractor asks, you hand over a read-only register and an evidence pack, and they can check it without taking your word for anything.

What we do not claim is that we make you compliant. We cannot, and any supplier who says otherwise is selling something that does not exist. Compliance is your workmanship and the right tested system. What we do is make it provable.

Buying from Australia

• Australian orders carry no UK VAT. We are not currently registered for Australian GST, so no GST is added; if we become required to register, we will say so and GST may be added to invoices from that point.
• Prices are shown and charged in pounds sterling. Your card issuer may add a foreign-transaction fee, which is theirs and not ours.
• Your instance is stood up by a person in London, not by a script. Australian business hours barely overlap UK ones, so plan on your instance being live by the following Australian morning rather than within the hour.
• Our terms carry an Australian Consumer Law clause: nothing in them excludes, restricts or modifies any consumer guarantee that cannot lawfully be excluded.
• Records are held on UK infrastructure. If you are disclosing personal information from Australia you remain the discloser for Australian Privacy Principle 8 purposes; a data-processing agreement and our sub-processor list are available on request, and the detail is on our trust page.