This entry was posted on Thursday, September 4th, 2008 at 12:27 am and is filed under General Category. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Office Seating & California Technical Bulletin 133
|
|
Q. What is California Technical Bulletin 133 (TB 133)?
A. TB 133 is a full-scale fire test for furniture manufactured for use in certain public buildings.
Q. Why was TB 133 developed?
A. TB 133 was developed by the bureau for two reasons.
In 1972 the California legislature enacted law requiring all upholstered furniture sold in California to be fire retardant. The Bureau of Home Furnishings was assigned the responsibility of developing fire standards. The bureau first addressed the fire safety of furniture in the residential occupancy by publishing Technical Bulletins 116 and 117, which became law in California in 1975, and are the minimum standards for any occupancy in California. It was not the bureau’s intent that TB 116 and TB 117 be the prescribed standards for public buildings. Therefore, TB 133 was developed to address the specific fire problems of furnishings in public buildings.
Second, after the issuance of TB 116 and TB 117, the bureau received many requests from fire departments, interior designers, architects and others asking for a fire performance standard for public building furniture. TB 133 was initially published in May 1984 as a document to be used by local fire authorities and others in buildings where they saw the need for such a standard.
Q. What is meant by a “full-scale fire test?”
A. TB 133 tests an actual article of furniture, or a furniture “mockup,” which includes all of the essential features of the finished furniture. A finished piece of furniture is placed in a test room and ignited by a gas ignition burner. Various measurements of temperature, smoke, carbon monoxide, heat generation, and weight loss of the furniture are taken. The measurements are then compared with test criteria developed by the bureau, which define acceptable fire performance. The standards does not specify how an article of furniture should be built, but only how the furniture should perform when tested by the procedure specified in TB 133. Therefore, TB 133 is known as a full-scale fire performance test.
Q. Is TB 133 just “one more fire retardenancy test?”
A. No. TB 133 does not call for tests of small samples of component materials. It requires that a complete seating furniture product be exposed to a large open flame in a specially designed test room. It then measures what happens when the components are used together.
Q. What is measured in the TB 133 test?
A. The test measures the amount of heat generated and the rate at which it is generated. In addition smoke opacity, carbon monoxide generation, and temperature are measured in the test room, as well as the weight loss of the product being tested. Test criteria have been developed which set limits on each of the measurements listed above.
Q. Does TB 133 only apply to furniture sold in California?
A. The bureau?’s jurisdiction applies only to the state of California; however, several other states have adopted TB 133. The city of Boston mandates that all commerical office seating must meet TB 133 and vigorously enforce the law.
Q. How will TB 133 be enforced in other states?
A. All of the states that have adopted TB 133, other than California, have designated the state fire marshal as the person responsible for developing regulations and enforcing the standard. Questions regarding regulations and enforcement in those states should be directed to the office of the state fire marshal.
See Also:
- Terrell & Terrell, CPAs, LLP Offers Business Process Documentation Services
- August’s Most Popular Dating Sites
- Terrell & Terrell, CPAs, LLP Offers Business Process Documentation Services
- South Bay Tennis Teams Helps Capture 2008 Gar Glenney Cup
- Attention Fantasy Football Widows: Celebrifantasy Puts the “Fan” into Fantasy Sports for Women
[Via ArticleCube.com - Happiness]
Leave a Reply
