Comms Rooms: 4 Risks Office Assessments Never Reach
Every professional and financial office has one. A locked room off a corridor, holding racks, switches, patch panels, an uninterruptible power supply and often a gas suppression system. Nobody works in it. People go into it, occasionally, usually alone, usually to fix something that has already gone wrong.
It is the only space on the floor with a genuinely hazardous environment, and it is almost always outside the risk assessment. That happens because of ownership: the room belongs to IT, the building belongs to facilities, the fire system belongs to the landlord, and health and safety assessed the office.
This is not the same subject as a data centre, which is a designed facility with its own regime. This is the cupboard-sized version that every organisation has and nobody assesses.
Four risks.
1. The suppression system is a hazard as well as a control
The one that can kill somebody, and the one most organisations have never considered.
Many comms rooms are protected by gas suppression rather than water, because water and racks are incompatible. Those systems work by displacing or reducing oxygen, or by chemical interruption of combustion, and they are designed to discharge into a sealed room very quickly.
Three consequences follow. A person inside the room during a discharge faces an atmosphere that may not support them, and in a small sealed space that risk is real rather than theoretical. The discharge itself is extremely loud and produces a rapid pressure change, which is why these rooms have pressure relief provision. And the room needs to reseal for the system to work, which is why propping the door open defeats it.
The practical arrangements are: a means of disabling the system before anyone works inside, under control so it cannot be left disabled; a clear entry procedure and signage; an audible and visual pre-discharge warning with time to leave; and a rule that nobody works in there alone while the system is armed.
Article 13 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires appropriate firefighting equipment and that non-automatic equipment is easily accessible and indicated by signs, and the wider duty to take general fire precautions covers how a suppression system interacts with the people who may be present. Where the system is impaired for maintenance, that is a change to the building's fire strategy for the duration and belongs on a permit.
2. Batteries, heat and the atmosphere they create
The second environmental risk, and it has two forms depending on the technology.
Traditional valve-regulated lead acid batteries in an uninterruptible power supply can vent hydrogen, particularly when charging or when a cell fails. Hydrogen is flammable and accumulates at high level in a sealed room, which is precisely the condition a comms room provides. Where a flammable atmosphere could arise, the Dangerous Substances and Explosive Atmospheres Regulations apply, and HSE's guidance on DSEAR sets out the assessment required. Ventilation is the control, and it needs to be verified rather than assumed.
Lithium-based systems present a different profile: no hydrogen, but a thermal runaway risk with a fire that behaves unlike a conventional one and that gas suppression may not resolve.
Alongside both sits heat. Regulation 6 of the Workplace (Health, Safety and Welfare) Regulations 1992 requires effective and suitable provision to ensure ventilation by fresh or purified air. A room whose cooling has been running at capacity since additional equipment was installed is a room where somebody will be working in significant heat, and where a cooling failure escalates quickly.
The question to ask your facilities team is simple: has anything been added to that room since the cooling and ventilation were specified? The answer is almost always yes.
3. Somebody is in there alone, out of hours, behind a locked door
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The organisational risk, and it is the most likely to produce a bad outcome.
Comms room work happens when systems can be taken down, which means evenings and weekends. The person doing it is frequently a contractor, frequently alone, in a locked room that others cannot enter, in a building that may be otherwise empty.
Combine that with the two environmental risks above and with live electrical work, and it is a lone working scenario with real consequence. HSE publishes guidance on lone working, and the practical elements are unremarkable: knowing who is in the building and where, a check-in arrangement, a means of summoning help that works inside a room designed to block signals, and a stated position on which tasks may not be done alone.
That signal point matters more than it sounds. Comms rooms are frequently shielded, in basements, or behind heavy doors, and a mobile phone is not a reliable means of raising an alarm from inside one.
4. Nobody owns it, so nothing gets assessed
The structural failure that explains the other three.
Ask who is responsible for the comms room and you will usually get three partial answers. IT owns the equipment. Facilities owns the space. The landlord owns the suppression system, the power supply and sometimes the room itself. Health and safety assessed the office and did not include a room nobody works in.
The consequence is that nothing has an owner: not the ventilation verification, not the suppression system disable procedure, not the entry rule, not the isolation arrangements, not the lone working position.
Resolve it explicitly. Name one accountable person, establish in writing what the landlord provides and what you provide, and bring the room into the same assessment, permit and inspection regime as everything else. In a leased building this is a conversation to have with the operator, and where more than one party has duties in respect of the same premises the law requires co-operation and co-ordination.
Electrical work in there sits under the Electricity at Work Regulations framework like any other, and entry may raise the question of whether the space meets the definition in regulation 3 of the Confined Spaces Regulations 1997, which turns on substantial enclosure and a reasonably foreseeable specified risk.
Four questions to ask this week
| Risk | Question | Usual answer |
|---|---|---|
| Suppression | Can the system be disabled before entry, and is that controlled? | Nobody knows |
| Batteries and heat | Has ventilation been verified since equipment was added? | No |
| Lone working | Can someone raise an alarm from inside the room? | Not tested |
| Ownership | Who is the named accountable person? | Three partial answers |
The fourth row produces the other three. An unowned room accumulates equipment, loses its ventilation margin, and keeps a suppression system nobody has been briefed on.
For multi-site and international groups
Two points.
Comms rooms proliferate quietly. Every office acquires one, and a group with twelve offices has twelve of these rooms, assessed to twelve different standards or to none. They are also the least likely space to be included in a group standard, because group standards are written about people and these rooms nominally have none.
And where suppression systems are involved, national requirements on installation, signage, testing and the handling of the agents differ. A group specification that works in London may not satisfy the local regime elsewhere.
Holding assessments, permits and maintenance records for every site in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits are usually how these rooms get looked at for the first time.
Where Arinite fits
Arinite assesses the spaces that fall between departments, which is where the significant hazards in an office building usually sit. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with finance and banking, legal and IT and software organisations, all of which run rooms like this on every floor plate they occupy.
Where sites span several countries, our global health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction requires, and our international health and safety consultants keep that current as estates change.
If nobody can tell you who disables the suppression system before an engineer goes in, a free gap analysis will show you what else that room has accumulated.
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Written by
Arinite Health & Safety Consultants
Health & Safety Expert at Arinite
