How do you weigh the cost of preventing a panel fire against the fire itself?

Technical teams usually evaluate a fire early-warning system on its measurement capability. On the procurement and budget side the question is different: what does this investment correspond to?

The two views do not conflict, but they need a different frame.

The wrong comparison

The most common mistake is to compare the system cost against the existing maintenance budget. That comparison is wrong, because the system does not replace a maintenance activity — it lowers a probability.

The right comparison is against the total cost of the event avoided. That cost is not a single line item.

The line items of the event avoided

The cost of a panel fire varies by facility, but the headings are similar:

Direct equipment loss. The panel, the switchgear inside it and neighbouring equipment. This is usually the easiest item to estimate and often the smallest share of the total.

Outage duration. Hourly production loss in a manufacturing plant; critical units going offline in a hospital; affected customer count and outage minutes for a distribution operator. This item is facility-specific and has to come from inside the organisation.

Recommissioning. Replacing the damaged panel, reviewing the cabling, testing and bringing it back into service. Material lead time can be the factor that determines total outage length.

Compliance and reporting. Sector-dependent regulatory notification obligations, the safety investigation, and the internal time it consumes.

Life safety. This item is not expressed in money, but in buildings such as hospitals, schools and dormitories it is the decisive element.

The probability side

The decision rests on probability as well as cost, and here internal data is needed: how many panel-originated incidents occurred in past years, how many thermal camera surveys produced findings, how many times maintenance records report a loose terminal or an overheated connection.

These records usually exist inside the organisation but have never been assessed together. Brought together, they form the base that feeds both the justification for the investment and the prioritisation of coverage.

The cost of installation itself

The hidden cost of a monitoring system is often the installation: outage planning, taking units offline, permit-to-work processes.

ArcFire Sense probes are installed without cutting power and with no mechanical modification to the panel enclosure. Commissioning does not stop production or service. That removes one line item from the calculation entirely — decisive in facilities where the outage itself is the expensive part.

The daisy-chain field bus topology has a similar effect: a single cable run serves every probe in a panel group, with no dedicated run per probe.

Prioritising coverage

There is no requirement to cover the entire panel inventory in the first phase. The common and sensible approach is to start where the consequence would be heaviest:

• Panels feeding critical units (theatres and intensive care in a hospital; the main line in production).
• Unstaffed points with long visit intervals (substations, field panels).
• Generator cabinets, UPS and battery rooms — where AirQuality Sense joins the same field bus with its hydrogen and carbon monoxide channels.

A single IQ Panel carries up to 32 probe nodes on its field bus, so coverage can be extended later on the same infrastructure.

The data the decision needs

This piece gives no cost figure — it cannot, because every decisive line item is facility-specific. What it gives is the set of questions to ask:

1. What does one hour of outage cost at this facility?
2. How long does it take to replace and recommission a damaged panel?
3. How many panel-originated incidents or findings were recorded in the last five years?
4. Which panels in the inventory would produce the heaviest consequence if they failed?

Once you have answers to those four, the comparison becomes possible.