Reacton Fire Suppression’s Chief Technical Officer, Ed Barnes, shares insights into their metrology lab, international plans and engineering for accessible, high-quality fire suppression solutions
With an emphasis on innovation and quality, Ed Barnes, Chief Technical Officer at Reacton Fire Suppression, has been on a journey in engineering that his developed a commitment to delivering precision-driven, accessible fire suppression solutions.
Reacton’s state-of-the-art metrology lab ensures world-class product standards, positioning the company as a leader in the fire and safety sector.
As the industry gears up for Intersec 2025, Barnes offers insights into Reacton’s global strategy, including their ambitious plans for the EMEA region and beyond.
Can you tell me about Reacton’s metrology lab and its impact on product quality?
The metrology lab is a specialised facility for precise measurement and quality control, providing capabilities that many competitors and subcontracting engineering companies lack due to insufficient scientific tools.
To control quality to an exceptional standard, we needed the same measurement tools used in making our parts—measuring dimensions, surfaces and other physical aspects of them daily.
The metrology lab enables us to measure and control the goods we receive and those we make or machine in-house.
It’s also a diagnostics tool for finding items that may need adjusting.
If you make mechanical parts, it’s your diagnostics laboratory.
We’ve invested about a quarter of a million pounds in measurement and quality control equipment.
This allows us to build a stable understanding of the parts we receive and make.
Over time, it enables us to detect problems like dimension creep.
The equipment has enabled our team to learn and develop themselves.
They’ve learned more from measuring and monitoring than from making the parts.
We measure with micron accuracy—a micron is one-thousandth of a millimetre.
Knowing precisely what something is allows the team to make good decisions about what to do with that part.
How does the metrology lab ensure precision and reliability across Reacton’s products?
Everything we receive and make is measured precisely against every drawing.
We’re not just talking about dimensions but also measuring things like surface finish, which is crucial for seals.
If you need to keep gas in a cylinder, you need to know how the seal performs over time.
We’ve introduced helium leak detection equipment at multiple levels, which complements the metrology lab.
It allows us to measure gas leakage rates precisely. We can determine if a leak will take a day to drain a volume or 120 years.
This means every product that leaves our factory has been precisely tested and diagnosed to the standard we intended.
We’re not just assembling something and assuming it works over time; we’ve got exact numbers for days, months, years, or leak rates that meet our tolerances.
Having the equipment to diagnose what we’ve made ensures we maintain high precision and reliability across our product range.
How does the lab drive innovation in Reacton’s fire suppression systems?
The metrology lab allows us to control our tolerances more precisely.
By measuring everything accurately, we can reduce our tolerances, leading to better-performing products.
The team learns more from measuring and monitoring, which contributes to innovation.
We can detect issues early, make adjustments and improve designs based on precise data.
Having the metrology lab and equipment like helium leak detectors enables us to experiment and develop new products with confidence.
We can simulate how parts will perform, measure outcomes and iterate on designs efficiently.
This accelerates innovation in our design and development process.
How do you provide precision-engineered solutions to cost-sensitive markets worldwide?
The key is the standardisation of products.
Our concepts and intellectual property are based on common items.
Where other businesses might use different products for different markets—like vehicle fires, control panels, kitchens, or CNC machines—we use the same products across applications.
This allows us to focus our engineering control around these products.
Instead of making multiple different valves, we make one main common valve.
This means we can centre our manufacturing around one product, honing the quality and producing in volume.
Hoses, valves, nozzles, fittings and bracketry are all common components that have undergone multiple revisions.
By simplifying and standardising our components, we can purchase in larger quantities, reduce stock and maintain high quality, making our solutions accessible even in cost-sensitive markets.
We machine about 150 components in-house now, up from not making anything internally two years ago.
We brought in the metrology lab and CNC machines not to save money but to control what we make.
The variations of standard products means that we already deeply understand how the core product works.
How does the metrology lab help adapt products for diverse EMEA market requirements?
Different markets have different requirements, like pressure directives for cylinders or specific valve functions.
However, we still use common components.
The valve may undergo changes for different markets, but 90% of it remains the same as the one we originally engineered.
When adapting to a market, we don’t start from scratch; we look for the shortest path without creating an entirely new product range.
The metrology lab allows us to ensure that any adaptations meet necessary standards and regulations.
We can measure and test components to ensure they comply with regional requirements while maintaining our high-quality standards.
Most necessary adaptations have been made, so our product can be sold anywhere and meet all requirements.
How do the lab’s capabilities align with Reacton’s goals for accessible, reliable solutions?
The metrology lab’s capabilities are central to our focus on precision and accessibility.
By measuring and controlling every aspect of our products precisely, we ensure they are reliable and perform as intended.
This precision allows us to innovate confidently, knowing we can test and validate new designs effectively.
The lab also supports our goal of accessibility by enabling us to standardise components and produce them efficiently.
By controlling the quality and consistency of our products, we can offer high-quality solutions at competitive prices, making them accessible to a wider range of customers.
What recent successes or innovations stand out as impactful for both Reacton and the wider industry?
Our detection side has seen a major overhaul with new electronic components that complement the system.
We’ve refined our manufacturing processes internally, equipping our team with more tools to produce products to an even higher standard in less time.
There have been many improvements in lean manufacturing.
We’ve made significant upgrades to our system to meet traceability and quality requirements for industries like transport and military, securing future contracts in those areas.
We’ve introduced a simulation suite to simulate vibration, flow, stress, temperature and wear before producing parts, which is particularly useful for special projects with unknown variables.
Any final thoughts?
In safety engineering, you can come up with wonderful ideas to keep people safe, but if they’re impractical or expensive, they won’t be adopted.
The adoption of safety equipment depends on its feasibility. If protecting every bus costs too much, it won’t happen.
But if it’s affordable, it will. That’s where value engineering comes in.
You can create unbelievable products with broad applications by building a standard set of components honed over years.
If you’re going to do something, you do it to the best possible standard, with the best value engineering and repeatability in quality.
My career has been about identifying how we can do things better and finding ways to improve.
That comes from designing well, manufacturing to the highest standard and providing exceptional customer support.
Engineering is disruptive because you learn through failure and embracing failure is essential.
The passion for quality is crucial. It leads to finding and working with the right customers.
If your distributors and customers don’t share the same passion for quality, then you’re not in the right place.
Driving the passion for quality brings the right customers.
We use our own products in the UK; all our CNC machines use the systems we sell worldwide.
We’ve had incidents on our machines where the system has done what it’s supposed to do.
The passion for quality is the headline. For me, quality drives the right behaviours in business almost all of the time.
This article was originally published in the January 2025 issue of International Fire & Safety Journal – to read your FREE digital copy, click here.