For student accommodation providers and universities
Smoke control that survives freshers' week.
A full intake of new residents every September, most living away from home for the first time, and life safety equipment in every corridor. O Range keeps it tamper-proof, remotely monitored, and evidenced, block after block.
Procurement
You ask seven questions. You get seven straight answers.
Day one price is the wrong test and you know it. The cheapest panel gets expensive fast: summer programme delays, call backs in term time, poor records, Golden Thread non-compliance and a maintenance contract you cannot escape. Ask these seven questions before you score anything.
You ask
Are we locked into one contractor?
Our answer
NoO Range is open protocol. Your existing maintenance contractor in each city can look after it once registered with us.
You ask
Can students interfere with it?
Our answer
NoThe controls sit dead in standby and only wake in a smoke event.
You ask
Can we prove setup?
Our answer
YesCommissioning configuration, fire strategy, wiring schematic and cause and effect live online for every block, open to head office and every maintenance engineer.
You ask
Can we see what is happening across sites?
Our answer
YesVent Net alerts you within seconds of a fault, fire or manual activation on any block in any city, with full logs and remote log-in from desk, mobile or API.
You ask
Can we cut routine testing visits?
Our answer
YesDaily, weekly, monthly and 6-month tests run and log themselves on every site, and alerts reach head office, including power loss or a panel dropping offline.
You ask
Can it feed our asset systems?
Our answer
YesO Range API Connect feeds events, test results and asset data into your CAFM across the whole portfolio.
You ask
Can we standardise the portfolio?
Our answer
YesOne product family for every block, every city.
The blunt student housing problem
Students test everything. Including your smoke control.
Purpose-built student accommodation concentrates sleeping risk, high churn and curious hands in one building. The smoke control system has to work despite all three.
Sleeping risk
Blocks full of sleeping residents. Escape routes have to work first time, every time.
Misuse and tampering
Vaping, smoking, pranks and propped vents. Open controls do not last a term.
Total churn
A new intake every year. You never finish educating residents, so the system has to protect itself.
Nuisance operation
Vents opened for weather or curiosity mean water ingress, wind damage and call outs.
Portfolio pressure
Sites across cities with mixed legacy panels create slow diagnosis and contractor dependency.
Reputation
Parents, university partners and social media. One bad incident travels fast.
Available for purpose, not misuse
Nothing for curious hands to play with.
In student blocks, open controls invite avoidable problems: roof vents left open, water ingress, wind damage, and life safety equipment treated as a toy or a window control.
Resident Protection System
During normal standby the O Range firefighter switch offers no open and close control at all. It goes live when the system activates. A corridor of students walking past it every day cannot operate it, damage it through casual use, or set it off for a laugh: not residents, not cleaners, not contractors.
Stops casual operation
Students and contractors cannot open vents for vaping, weather or curiosity.
Protects the building
No vents left open over reading week. Less wind and rain damage, fewer soaked corridors.
Protects the operator
Fewer nuisance call outs and a clean record of every genuine activation.
Vent Net remote monitoring
Your whole portfolio on one screen.
When your blocks are in five cities, you cannot rely on site teams noticing a fault light. Vent Net tells your compliance team what happened, where, within seconds, with a full system activity log that is Golden Thread compliant.
Included with every O Range system
- Log in to any panel from head office
- Maintenance dates for every block, visible
- A digital thread per building
Vent Net full monitoring Nominal annual cost
- Alerts within seconds, from any site in any city
- Live view of activity across the whole portfolio
- Every log and every test, readable without a site visit
- Remote firefighter switch activation with automatic switch-off
- Monthly function tests triggered remotely and logged
- 6-month tests recorded as compliance evidence, block by block
Compliance and audit evidence
Golden Thread compliance, built in.
Tall student blocks sit squarely in the Building Safety Act regime, and the question is no longer what was installed. It is what the accountable person can prove later. Smoke control should feed that evidence, not sit outside it.
Product identity
Every panel carries its own product records, setup details and handover documents.
Commissioning clarity
Cause and effect for every block stored centrally, not in one engineer's memory.
Maintenance confidence
Structured records keep checks consistent across cities and contractors.
Change control
When configuration changes between intakes, the record changes with it.
The living evidence trail
Vent Net's digital thread logs product, configuration, commissioning, maintenance and change control for every block as it happens. Nobody has to remember to update a folder between intakes.
O Range API Connect
One data feed for the whole portfolio.
O Range API Connect pushes event data, test results and asset records from every block into the systems you already run: CAFM, asset management, building safety cases. Head office records match what happened on site, automatically, in every city.
Event data pushed to your CAFM or asset management platform
Machine-readable test and maintenance records per block
Asset registers that update themselves across the portfolio
The O Range smoke control system
Built for towers, not just walk-ups.
Student blocks run taller than general needs housing, typically 5 to 40 floors, and the smoke control follows: natural AOVs on the lower-rise blocks, mechanical extract, smoke shafts and dampers on the towers. O Range handles both natural and mechanical ventilation from one addressable platform.
Single stairwell AOV
Natural AOV control at the stair head for lower-rise cluster-flat blocks.
Mechanical shafts and dampers
Control logic for mechanical extract, smoke shafts and damper arrangements in towers.
Networked campuses
Connected panels give head office one standard across every tower and every city.
For your contractor
Your contractor orders it. We back them up.
Accommodation operators rarely buy panels directly, and they should not have to. Your M&E or maintenance contractor can specify, order and commission O Range through Vent Trade, with product, wiring, commissioning and handover support from a smoke ventilation specialist. Panel swaps fit inside the summer turnover window. Point them at us.
Who you are buying from
Since 1988. Stock on the shelf. Engineers on the phone.
Need a student accommodation specification pack?
Get the spec pack before the summer window.
Product schedule, cause and effect notes, tamper protection wording, commissioning evidence checklist and a maintenance handover pack, reusable across every block in the portfolio.