RAISED FLOORING SPECIFICATIONS The PSA Specification has been used in the UK for over 25 years as the “British Standard” for raised access floors and it is demanding and onerous but in terms of load carrying capability, there are just 4 UK standards: light, medium, heavy & extra heavy. These are arranged vertically in that each grade will comply with any grades which are lower in the scale. In a drive to arrive at harmonized standards throughout the EU a new standard was created via the “European Committee for Standardization”, the European specification EN12825 (which is now also recognized as a British Standard BSEN12825) and this allows for up to 72 performance standards! Because these standards are not arranged vertically, there is great potential for misunderstanding and little prospect of consensus between the parties involved as to what is sought, what is needed and what is offered. Evaluation testing under EN12825 replaces independent testing and certification, which will no longer be available therefore manufacturer, contractor and client relies on the manufacturer’s own testing and self certification. Beyond the evaluation of the proposed system, to either PSA or BSEN, it is important to also realize that although the PSA Specification recognizes the need to specify installation criteria as well as manufacturing standards installation is not featured at all in BSEN. Once again RIBA, through NBS, have attempted to include EN12825 within K41 so that an electronic specification writer would be available but as it is not possible to show a direct correlation between PSA and EN12825 it has been suggested that specifiers are finding it difficult to decide which parts of the two Standards should be used/adopted. Because of this the Access Flooring Association have attempted to set down some guidance notes that could be used when specifying raised access floors.

Using either PSA MOB PF2 PS/SPU or BSEN12825 During the past 25 years the PSA MOB PF2 PS/SPU has become the “British Standard”, and more recently K41 has become the method of writing specifications that provide proven comfort to the specifier & end user. The new BSEN12825 standard attempts to encompass the products currently used throughout Europe but there does appear to be some confusion being raised by specifiers due to the complexity of BSEN12825. Without doubt considerably more technical input is required to write a specification based upon BSEN12825 than the PSA Specification and we were concerned that this could lead to subsequent complications. To provide assistance in avoiding future difficulties we have prepared two simple charts which provide some insight into how systems might be chosen and how PSA/ K41 or BSEN12825 could be interpreted.

Using systems independently tested and shown to comply with the PSA Performance Specification MOB PF2 PS/SPU Using systems classified to BSEN12825 APPENDIX