Managing Compliance in the Cable Pathway

Maintaining Fire and Smoke Seals within the structured cabling pathway is an ongoing challenge, juggling the demands of the facility vs the limits of firestop products installed at each wall and floor assembly. Purpose-built firerated and smoke and acoustical pathways such as EZ-Path® eliminated this challenge by making the seal at each barrier maintenance free. However, there exists a significant amount of legacy infrastructure that was built prior to devices like EZ-Path® that continue to struggle with compliance.

Three years ago, we launched the EZ-Path® Retrofit Device for remediating non-compliant cable sleeves and stubs. Installing quickly and easily around cable sleeves and conduit stubs, instantly restoring fire performance even when installed around sleeves loaded to 100% visual fill with cabling. Depending on the age of your building, if you were to pop a ceiling tile at any fire-rated wall where cable penetrations occur there is a high likelihood that you will find a non-compliant cable sleeve needing remediation. As anyone that works with structured cabling can tell you, solutions for conduit sleeve and stubs are great, but we run cables throughout buildings using many different methods, the most prolific being cable trays.

In June of this year, we expanded the EZ-Path® Retrofit line with a new solution for non-compliant cable tray penetrations, the EZ-Path® Cable Tray Retrofit Device. This new addition to the EZ-Path® Family of cable pathway solutions builds upon the design of the original EZ-Path® Retrofit Device, providing an out of the box solution for noncompliant cable tray penetrations. Utilizing a two-part clam shell design, the EZ-Path® Cable Tray Retrofit Device installs around
existing cable tray penetrations, instantly restoring fire performance without requiring abatement of cables or removal of previously installed firestop products. Similar to the original EZ-Path® Retrofit Device, the EZ-Path® Cable Tray Retrofit Device can be installed over existing firestop products from any vendor. This is a unique advantage that both the EZ-Path® Retrofit Device and EZ-Path® Cable Tray Retrofit Device can offer that no other solution in the UL Fire Resistance Directory can offer.

The EZ-Path® Cable Tray Retrofit Device comes from the factory pre-sized for common cable tray widths and is sized to accommodate for trays up to 6” in depth with up to 100% visual fill of cables. Additionally, an oversized opening plate is available for installation around trays with excessive annular space. As of this writing, additional testing using our SpecSeal® Composite Sheet is in progress for allowing for use of the EZ-Path® Cable Tray Retrofit Device in the most extreme of opening and annular space conditions.

If you want to learn more about the original EZ-Path® Retrofit Device, EZ-Path® Cable Tray Retrofit Device, or any other devices in the EZ-Path® Family, follow the links below or contact your local STI Rep.

EZ-Path Retrofit Device
EZ-Path Cable Tray Retrofit Device
Overall EZ-Path Family