Project Highlight: Louisville Mega Caverns

UNIQUE PROJECTS AND SPECIALIZED SOLUTIONS

The Louisville Mega Caverns, over 4 million sq. ft. of earth mined for its limestone for over 40 years, eventually being acquired and transformed into a one-of-a-kind environment of usable commercial and entertainment space. Ryan Fire Protection, a partner to Space Age Electronics was tasked with providing fire protection systems throughout the newly developed areas of the historic caverns.

When considering the uniqueness of the space, project
manager Bryce Handy and system designer John Johnson had to consider special codes and standards such as, NFPA 520, the Standard on Subterranean Spaces, that give guidance to how underground environments shall be protected.
Considering the challenges that may be faced on such a
project, Bryce and John looked to partner with Space Age Electronics to achieve various project efficiencies that would benefit them from the very beginnings of designing system
interfaces, through the installation phase, eventually down to the final commissioning of the system.

Working with Space Age to design and develop various prefabricated enclosures to house several monitor modules within one location for all of their fire pump and fire sprinkler monitoring locations within the caverns, Ryan Fire was able to
coordinate their installation based on the time saved on installing these interfaces.

Utilized was the UL864 listed Space Age accessory enclosures along with custom designed and fabricated internal back plates. These back plates included prewired harnesses terminated to
labeled points for the field installation of the
system components. These kinds of prefabricated solutions save time on the installation and create a standard from location to location that increases installation accuracy and efficiency.

All the prefabricated monitor points within the caverns interface back to a specially designed graphic annunciation panel in the fire command room. The panel was designed to show the relative layout of points within the cavern spaces and visually annunciate an alarm condition by location. Also designed into this project was the use of the Space Age, Eclips series surge protection on all the 120v circuits coming into the panels, boosters, and power supplies on the system. These devices protect the critical system components from both over voltage power surges and over current events ensuring optimal up time and protection of the system overall.

Last, no project is complete without the proper NFPA 72 required system documentation to be available on site. Ryan Fire utilized not only the document enclosure but also the rolled drawing storage box for their system design drawings to be available on site as well.

“Utilizing these solutions from Space Age not only aesthetically improves the install but also allows us to improve the time of the installation with a better level of quality. They’re easy to access, easy to understand with the factory point labeling and will also increase efficiency upon the servicing of the system” – Bryce Handy & John Johnson | Ryan Fire Protection

To learn more about Space Age Electronics annunciation and prefabrication capabilities please visit: https://www.1sae.com/panelvu-annunciators