Residential Fire Sprinklers .com

Protecting Your Home & Family

Building a house? From floor plan to floor coverings, from cabinet design to counter tops, there seem to be endless choices to make when it comes to your new home. There is one choice that should be made, though, and it can save your life, and your new home. The choice is to have a residential fire sprinkler system installed during construction.

In America, in 2005 there were 396,000 residential fires, these caused 3,055 civilian fire deaths, 13,825 civilian fire injuries, and $6.9 billion in property damage. This was an average year. This does not count the injury and loss of life of our firefighters involved with residential fires. Studies by the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s United States Fire Administration indicate that the installation of residential fire sprinkler systems could have saved thousands of lives; prevented a large portion of those injuries; and eliminated hundreds of millions of dollars in property losses.

Millions have installed smoke alarms in their homes in the past few years, but a smoke alarm can only alert the occupants to a fire in the house … it cannot contain or extinguish a fire. Residential fire sprinkler systems can! This is why organizations like the National Association of State Fire Marshals; National Fire Protection Association; Home Safety Council, and the Residential Fire Safety Institute are actively promoting fire sprinklers to be installed in all homes. Losing 3000+ people a year to home fires is unacceptable.

When a fire starts at home it can become deadly in just three minutes. Fire sprinkler systems supply powerful fire protection, automatically, before the fire can spread, and before the fire department gets called, thus slowing or stopping the flames and poisonous smoke so you and yours can get out safely. This is an investment in your new home that really pays you back when its needed!

How do they work? Each sprinkler system is unique to the home where it is installed. It is designed by a state licensed sprinkler designer. Piping is networked through your home and is fed by the same water source as the plumbing for the home, the water main, or, if a well is used a storage tank may be needed. Quick-response sprinkler heads are connected to the piping in the walls or ceilings. These heads may be concealed so that only a flat three inch circle is visible. Each sprinkler head is temperature sensitive, when the heat from a fire reach about 165F, water flows from only that particular sprinkler head. Only the extreme heat of a fire will cause the sprinkler to operate. In most cases that will be all that is needed to stop the fire.

There is very little maintenance needed with a modern residential fire sprinkler system. Keep the sprinkler water valve on and perform a simple test you can do yourself, or hire your contractor, to verify water flow and the working of the fire bell or alarm system.

Let’s clear up some myths about residential fire sprinklers:

Myth – When one sprinkler goes off, all the sprinklers activate.
Only the sprinkler over the fire will activate. The sprinkler heads react to temperatures in each room individually. Thus, fire in a bedroom will activate only the sprinkler in that room.

Myth – A sprinkler could accidentally go off, causing severe water damage to a home.
Home sprinklers are specifically designed and are rigorously tested to minimize such accidents. Furthermore each sprinkler system is pressure tested at a much higher pressure than your house plumbing and yet it will only run at household pressure, so it much less likely to leak than the plumbing.

Myth – Water damage from a sprinkler system will be more extensive than fire damage.
The sprinkler system will severely limit a fire’s growth. Therefore, damage from a home sprinkler system will be much less severe than the smoke and fire damage if the fire had gone on unabated or even the water damage caused by water from firefighting hose lines.

Myth -Home sprinkler systems are expensive.
Current estimates suggest that when a home is under construction, a home sprinkler system should cost between 1 and 2% of the total building price. This is often the price of upgrading carpet or counter tops.

Myth – Residential sprinklers are ugly.
Residential sprinklers are now being designed to fit in with most any decor. These can lay flush with the ceiling with less than a quarter of the profile of smoke detector. If you so desire they can be factory painted to match your decor.

Certainly price is a factor in your choice of this safety system. Because every system is designed for the individual home, it is very difficult to set a per square foot price. But 1% to 2% of the total building price is very close. It depends on the water supply and the complexity of the ceilings, where most of the sprinkler heads will be installed. (This price will fall dramatically when all homes in a community have fire sprinklers installed, because permit charges, water purveyors fees, and other hidden charges will be reduced or eliminated). When done during new construction, the price of these systems is rolled into your mortgage, just like the electrical or heating system. All major insurance companies offer a valuable discount off your premiums, if there is a fire sprinkler system, so shop around. When you consider the tax deduction on your mortgage and the insurance discount, your sprinkler system will cost you less a month than some people spend on coffee drinks. Remember this price gives you something like a firefighter on duty in your house 24/7.

Most importantly, keep this in mind, when you add smoke detectors to a home the chances of surviving a fire are about 50%. When you include a fire sprinkler system along with the smoke alarms, you increase that figure to 82%. Now remember that in your home, these figures are for you and those you care for the most. Of all the choices that will be made when building your new home, this is the only one that could someday literally save the life of you or your loved ones.

Michael Cox serves as sales and marketing manager for 13dPEX.com, a design and distribution company in Bellingham Washington, dedicated to NFPA 13d sprinkler systems. This firm supplies design, tools, pumps, and installation materials to plumbers and others who are contracting to install 13d systems. Specializing in multipurpose or flow through design using PEX tubing as a primary material. He has worked in life-safety and fire prevention for more than two decades, holds a Washington State certificate for sprinkler design, and has worked with AHJs and Fire Chiefs through out the state. He is currently teaching a seminar program designed to prep plumbers and others to get their state certification.

2009 International Residential Code Will Require Residential Fire Sprinklers

The International Code Council (ICC) Board of Directors has voted unanimously to reject an appeal by the National Association of Home Builders seeking to remove residential fire sprinkler requirements from the 2009 edition of the International Residential Code (IRC). This action, which follows a unanimous vote by the ICC Appeals Board to reject the appeal, concludes ICC’s appeals process and exhausts the final administrative option for overturning the IRC sprinkler requirements prior to publication of the 2009 edition.

“This is truly a great day in the history of fire safety,” said Ronny Coleman, President of the IRC Fire Sprinkler Coalition. “ICC has now officially affirmed that the membership vote to require fire sprinklers in new homes was in compliance with their bylaws and regulations governing code development, and the unanimous vote by their Board of Directors removes any shadow of doubt regarding the legitimacy of the fire sprinkler requirement.”

NAHB’s appeal had asked ICC to set aside the sprinkler requirement because of claimed procedural irregularities, including an assertion that ICC’s bylaws do not permit firefighters, particularly volunteer firefighters, to vote in the ICC process. With the appeal rejected, ICC will now proceed with publication of the 2009 IRC, which serves as the basis of regulation for new home construction in 48 states plus the District of Columbia. The new code will require fire sprinklers in all new townhouses, effective immediately upon adoption, and in all new one- and two-family dwellings, effective January 1, 2011.

The potential impact of this code change is discussed at “Residential Fire Sprinklers Market Growth and Labor Demand Analysis“

The build green concept revolves around the environment, and is a fine idea that we can, if we modify our way of building and the materials we use, build a house that is in many ways more friendly to the environment both inside and outside the home. There has been much said about nearly every aspect of putting together a house, and a lot of thought as to ways that could be modified to make the structure more earth friendly. There seems to be one area that has got very little attention.

There is nothing green about a house on fire! A home burning down is a tragedy on a lot of levels. It could include loss of the home itself, and most, if not all the personal property inside. Also personal injury and even loss of life for you, your loved ones, and for the firefighters responding to the event. Environmentally such a fire produces tons of poisonous gases and particulates that get pushed into the air, and wastes thousands of gallons of potable water in fighting the flames. Certainly if there was a way to avoid this happening it would be worth a good look. In the USA fires kill more people each year than all other natural disasters combined, and most fire deaths (80%) occur in the home. We lose, on average, over 3000 people a year to home fires. In other words, someone dies from a home fire in this country roughly every 175 minutes. Add to that many thousands of injuries, millions of dollars in property loss, and untold damage to the environment per year. Not very green at all.

At a time where there seems to be such an interest in Green Building, in protection of our environment, it seems reasonable to build into a home not just the ability to warn the inhabitants of a fire, but also to suppress that fire if not put it out entirely, this would help the people, the house, and the environment. Smoke alarms are not enough. Smoke alarms have long been required in residences to warn those at home of a fire. These though can not protect the lives of those people, they can only announce a danger. If someone fails to hear or can not physically respond to a smoke alarm, the house fire will continue to grow until it can not be controlled and the loss we spoke about earlier is the result. While smoke alarms certainly are of high value in making a home safer, they have their limits and the fire continues to burn.

Residential fire sprinkler systems are the solution, they represent the gold standard for home fire safety. The design code is federal and designated NFPA 13D for single family residences duplexes, and manufactured homes. In conjunction with smoke alarms they vastly increase the chance of home fire survival, and as a nice side effect they contain the fire to one room and usually put the fire out.

Unlike commercial fire sprinklers, residential fire sprinklers were not designed to save the structure, the property within, or to help the environment. These are just the natural unintended side effects of a good design. The design goal of these systems is to saves lives by delaying flashover. As a fire grows in a home it is lethal with toxic gases very quickly. It reaches a point called “flashover” in as little three minutes (depending on the fire load or what exactly is burning). This is the point in a room where the fire has heated the room so much that the flammable gases and the contents of the room reach auto-ignition temperatures, first the smoke appears to catch fire and then the whole room, everything, bursts into flames. NOTHING lives through flashover. This being the case home fire sprinklers were designed to stop flashover by cooling the fire long before it can reach the kind of heat needed for flashover to occur.

These sprinklers can be concealed in the walls or ceiling and are part of the house plumbing system. Multipurpose systems carry potable water in the piping and stay fresh by circulation every time a water closet (toilet) is flushed. Because of this design, they do not require expensive antibackflow devices as commercial fire sprinklers. And they run at the same pressure as your home plumbing, so there is no need for the high pressure system also needed in commercial applications. The heads are independent of each other in their activation. They activate only by the extreme heat caused by fire (155F to 165F). Ninety percent of the time only one head is needed to control a fire. They never all go off at once like in the movies and TV.

This relatively new design of fire sprinklers (NFPA13D) are much more affordable than their heavy duty cousins used in commercial service and apartment buildings. Because most of the sprinkler heads are placed in the ceiling, the more complicated the ceiling the more heads are used. This makes it very tough to say it is so much per square foot, especially for custom homes. However, on new construction one can figure about 1%-2% of the price of the home. To retrofit a home is only slightly higher. This puts the price bracket about the same as upgrading flooring or cabinetry. Also home insurance is reduced because you have lowered the risk of catastrophic fire loss.

By adding residential fire sprinklers to your new or existing home you essentially are having a fire department on duty in your home twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. This certainly has a positive impact on the environment within your home. By extension it protects your community’s environment by drastically reducing the chance your home ever burning down and all but eliminating an avoidable tragedy.

These custom designed fire sprinkler systems can bring a great deal to your peace of mind into your home. A fire sprinkler system would make your house more green. They allow you and yours the needed time to escape if a fire should start. They use only a small fraction of the water a firetruck and crew will use to control or extinguish the fire. Because of fighting the fire so early, there is much less fire to fight. That means less pollution released into the air, less smoke damage, less fire damage, less water damage (compared to a what the fire department will use), all of which is good for your home, your pocketbook, and the environment.

Michael Cox serves as sales and marketing manager for 13dPEX.com, a design and distribution company in Bellingham Washington, dedicated to NFPA 13d sprinkler systems. This firm supplies design, tools, pumps, and installation materials to plumbers and others who are contracting to install 13d systems. Specializing in multipurpose or flow through design using PEX tubing as a primary material. He has worked in life-safety and fire prevention for more than two decades, holds a Washington State certificate for sprinkler design, and has worked with AHJs and Fire Chiefs through out the state. He is currently teaching a seminar program designed to prep plumbers and others to get their state certification.

A new report from the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) states “with the advent of new materials and innovative products for use in construction of single-family houses, there is a need to understand what impacts these materials and products will have on occupant life safety, under fire conditions and a need to develop a technical basis for the evaluation of their fire performance.” The results clearly indicate that while these new construction materials provide a structurally sound alternative to solid wood construction, thereby reducing the impact on our environment, they are susceptible to failure in a basement fire situation, far sooner than solid wood construction components used previously.

These new building materials are essential to the protection of our environment and the control of rising home construction costs. C.A.S.A. believes that the combined use of a residential fire sprinkler system and these new lightweight, environmentally sound building products, will provide new home buyers with a home that not only meets the performance of solid wood construction but exceeds it.

C.A.S.A. President, John Galt, stated “with the information in this report Canadian home builders need to embrace fire sprinkler technology and start providing home buyers with this proven level of life safety for their families”.

Fires in homes account for the majority of fire fatalities in Canada, 80% of all fire deaths occur in residential properties. The City of Vancouver has proven through their fire sprinkler bylaw that residences with a fire sprinkler system and smoke detectors increase occupant survivability by 88%.  In Vancouver, no fatalities have occurred in a residential property equipped with a fire sprinkler system installed to N.F.P.A. 13D since the implementation of their bylaw.

The Canadian Automatic Sprinkler Association (C.A.S.A.) welcomes the National Research Council (N.R.C.) summary report on “STUDY OF UNPROTECTED FLOOR ASSEMBLIES IN BASEMENT FIRE SCENARIOS” C.A.S.A. is proud to have been a partner in of this study and looks forward to participating in future studies.

About C.A.S.A.: C.A.S.A. is the voice of the sprinkler industry in Canada, representing contractors, designers and manufactures across Canada. C.A.S.A is a national leader in home fire safety and injury prevention through the use of residential fire sprinklers. Incorporated in 1961 C.A.S.A. has long been the leading advocate of fire sprinklers in Canada in the fight to reduce deaths as a result of fire. For more information on residential sprinklers please visit the following web sites: www.casa-firesprinkler.org www.homefiresprinkler.org

In November it was announced that the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) had formerly requested an appeal of RB64-07/08 and RB66-07/08, which requires residential fire sprinklers to be installed in one and two family homes and town homes effective January 1, 2011. See “National Association of Home Builders Requests Appeal of IRC Residential Fire Sprinklers Requirement” for more details.

Today, December 11, 2008, the International Code Council (ICC) Appeals Board met in Chicago to determine if there was any validity to the NAHB claims that a single interest group unfairly dominated the voting at the final action hearings. At the conclusion of the hearing the ICC Appeals Board unanimously voted (3-0) to deny the NAHB claim that the fire sprinkler industry engaged in practices that violated ICC established procedure.

This unanimous decision to uphold the voting members decision to pass RB64-07/08 and RB66-07/08 reinforces that the voting governmental members of the ICC are the decision makers and will not have their votes denied by special interest groups. Much to the frustration of interested parties concerned about the NAHB influence with the ICC, the appeal hearing did not allow for phone conferencing or web conferencing of the discussions, but supporters of residential fire sprinklers can feel confident that the ICC voting process has been upheld.

The passing of the IRC residential fire sprinkler requirements reinforces the growing recognition that fire sprinklers need to play an integral role in home fire safety.

The potential impact of this code change is discussed at “Residential Fire Sprinklers Market Growth and Labor Demand Analysis“

Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry Commissioner Steve Sviggum will host three town hall meetings this month to discuss fire sprinkler provisions that soon may be adopted as part of the state’s residential building code for new home construction. The 2006 International Residential Code is the basis for the residential code, and the Minnesota Department of Labor and Industry will soon begin the rule adoption process for the updated residential code, which will be based on the 2009 IRC. Because the International Code Council voted in September 2008 to add a fire sprinkler provision to its 2009 IRC, requiring fire sprinkling in all one- and two-family homes and townhouses that build to the code as of Jan. 1, 2011, Minnesota may include the sprinkler provision when it adopts the 2009 IRC.

“The new fire sprinkler requirements will have an impact on Minnesotans,” Sviggum said. “I appreciate the additional safety features that residential sprinklers can provide for Minnesota families and firefighters, but I also recognize the potential of a steep price tag attached. We need to discuss the potential changes to the building code that could affect homeowner safety and housing affordability.”

He said the meetings are an opportunity for an objective, balanced discussion about the issue. DLI will forward all information and comments to the advisory committee that will recommend changes to the Minnesota residential code.

The town hall meetings are set for Dec. 12 at the Rochester Public Library; Dec. 16 at Bemidji State University; and Dec. 18 at Metro State University in St. Paul.