In a high-rise fire, the riskiest moment is the change of plan — when stay put becomes get out. A BS 8629 evacuation alert system gives the fire and rescue service a dedicated, secure control panel to sound alerts flat by flat, floor by floor. Gemini AMPM designs, installs and maintains them for residential buildings that need one.
An evacuation alert system is deliberately separate from any fire alarm. It sits behind a locked, red evacuation alert control and indicating equipment (EACIE) panel near the firefighting entrance, accessible only to the fire and rescue service. Crews arriving at an incident can trigger sounders in chosen flats — typically by floor — to tell residents to evacuate, while everyone else stays put as the strategy intends. BS 8629:2019+A1:2023 specifies all of it: the panel, the zoning, the sounder levels in bedrooms, the standby power and the segregation from other systems.
The Building Safety Act era has made this hardware mainstream. In Scotland it is already required for new residential buildings over 18 metres, and fire engineers, insurers and gateway reviewers increasingly expect it elsewhere. For existing blocks, it is one of the most direct answers to a fire risk appraisal that questions how a stay-put building would ever be emptied.
Getting BS 8629 right is mostly about discipline. Alert zones must map cleanly to how crews will actually work the building. Wiring needs enhanced fire resistance and full segregation from every other service. Sounders — or in many blocks, radio-linked units that avoid decorating every flat — must hit specified sound levels at the bedhead. And the whole installation has to be agreed with the local fire and rescue service, whose crews will one day open that panel in the dark.
Gemini AMPM handles design, installation, commissioning and the consultation in between, using C-TEC, Kentec, Advanced and Hochiki equipment certified for the job. Handover includes zone charts, certificates and training for your managing agent, then planned maintenance keeps the system credible year after year. It pairs naturally with the rest of our fire systems work in residential buildings.
In Scotland, yes for new domestic buildings over 18 metres. In England and Wales there is no blanket statutory duty yet, but the direction of travel is unmistakable: BS 8629 is referenced in guidance, expected by many fire and rescue services for new high-rise residential schemes, and increasingly requested by insurers and Building Safety Act gateway reviewers. For existing buildings, a fire risk appraisal may recommend one as the practical means of changing evacuation strategy during an incident.
A communal fire alarm detects fire and sounds automatically; an evacuation alert system does neither. It has no detectors and never operates on its own — it waits, silent, until a fire and rescue service officer unlocks the panel and selects which zones to alert. That separation is deliberate: it preserves the stay-put strategy in normal conditions while giving crews a controlled way to evacuate specific floors if the incident outgrows the plan. BS 8629 requires the two systems to remain independent.
Yes — most of the demand is retrofit. Radio-linked sounders dramatically reduce time inside each flat, often to a single short visit, and the panel, power supplies and riser wiring go into communal areas. The work is sequenced floor by floor with proper resident notice, and access refusals are tracked and rescheduled rather than skipped. Commissioning then proves sound levels in a sample of flats before the system is offered to the fire service and signed off.
A named engineer, not a call centre, comes back within 24 hours. Tell us the building and what you’re dealing with, and we’ll scope it properly.