Home / Fire Alarm Design & Commissioning
/ Domestic fire alarm certificate software
BS 5839-6 is the British Standard for fire detection and fire alarm systems in dwellings — houses, flats, HMOs and sheltered or supported housing. Design, installation and commissioning are the front end of a system's life: the system is specified against the property (the grade of system and the category of detection coverage it needs), installed, and then commissioned — tested as a whole, with every device proved to operate and interconnect correctly, before it is handed over and put into service. That is a distinct certificate from the periodic servicing and maintenance that keeps the same system working afterwards — see fire alarm servicing for that certificate.
This is domestic fire alarm work specifically. Commercial fire alarm systems — offices, warehouses, larger multi-occupancy buildings — are designed and certified under a different standard, BS 5839-1, which is a separate discipline with its own certification. NexCert's fire alarm certificates cover the domestic standard, BS 5839-6, only.
A competent person — typically a fire alarm installer or an electrician with the relevant fire detection training — designs, installs and commissions the system, then issues the certificate confirming what was fitted, to what grade and category, and that it was tested and found to operate correctly on handover. Domestic fire alarm systems to BS 5839-6 are commonly specified for new-build dwellings under Building Regulations guidance, for HMOs as a condition of licensing, and for sheltered or supported housing, alongside whatever a fire risk assessment for the specific property requires.
This section describes the standard and the kind of property it applies to as general information. Whether a specific property needs a system, and to what grade and category, is a decision for the competent person carrying out the design and the property's fire risk assessment — not something this page can tell you for a specific job.
The engineer completes the design, installation and commissioning record on a phone or tablet, on site, with the form working offline and resuming if signal drops — the device grade, category, what was installed and tested, and the commissioning results. Where a supervisor needs to check and sign off the certificate before it goes out, that sign-off happens remotely from a desktop, without the certificate waiting for them to visit the site. The finished certificate is delivered with an evidence trail: what was designed, installed and tested, by whom, and when it was signed off.
There are fields for your own NICEIC, NAPIT, SELECT or Gas Safe registration number, at both company and individual engineer level, on every certificate NexCert issues.
Fire alarm design/installation/commissioning and fire alarm servicing are two of the fifteen certificate types NexCert ships, alongside the electrical family (BS 7671) and gas family (GSIUR 1998). They sit inside the NexCert Electrical product line, which unlocks the electrical, fire and ventilation certificate families in one workspace — useful for a firm that does fire alarm work alongside electrical installation, rather than running a separate tool for each.
Fire alarm installation is frequently one part of a larger domestic job — a rewire, an HMO conversion, or fitting mechanical ventilation at the same time. If ventilation commissioning is also part of the job, see the ventilation test certificate; if the work is electrical installation or condition reporting, see EICR. All three sit in the same NexCert workspace, so a multi-trade job doesn't need three separate pieces of software.
/ FAQ
No. Commercial fire alarm systems are designed and certified to BS 5839-1, a different standard with its own certification process. NexCert's fire alarm certificates cover domestic systems under BS 5839-6 only.
No. Design, installation and commissioning is issued once, when a new system is fitted and proved to work. Servicing is a separate, periodic certificate for keeping an existing system working — see fire alarm servicing.
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