Changes to the Scope of Requirements for the Placing or Making Available on the Domestic Market of Construction Products Used for Fire Protection Marked with a Construction Mark

Abstract

Purpose: Construction products used for the purposes of fire protection must meet the statutory requirements for the placing or making available on the domestic market of construction products for fire protection marked with a construction mark. The amendments introduced in the new regulation are compared with the previous legislation to indicate the introduced changes. Introduction: At the beginning of 2017 a new regulation concerning the manner of declaring the performance of construction products and the procedure of marking them with a construction mark, including for products used in fire protection, amended by the Regulation of 2018 entered into force. The signifi-cance of these changes necessitates their analysis in the context of the previous regulation. It is important that the introduced regulation bear similarity to the provisions of EU Regulation No 305/2011 on construction products. In addition to the amended and new requirements for construction products, the authors devoted attention to the new products that were added to the list of products subject to the certification process for placing or making available on the domestic market and marking with a construction mark (the new regulations added as many as five new subgroups contained in the group “Fixed fire-fighting systems”). This paper presents changes in the naming and scope of technical specifications that form the basis for conducting certification processes. It also describes the manner of marking construction products with a construction mark pursuant to the Act on Construction Products and the obligatory information to accompany the marking. The performance of the assessment and verification process is completed with a declaration of performance prepared by the manufacturer of the construction product, the draft of which is presented in this paper. Methodology: To present the differences between the two legal documents, the authors analysed the requirements contained therein and identified the new requirements contained in the 2016 Regulation (applicable since 2017), as amended by the Regulation of 2018. Conclusions: This article presents the similarities and differences between the national system of compliance of the conformity assessment system effective until 31 December 2016, and the system of assessment and verification of constancy of performance introduced on 1 January 2017, and the consequences for both the manufacturers and the certification bodies.

Keywords

• fire protection
• construction product
• certification
• construction mark