Rethinking Sprinklers

Recent product improvements, lower costs and increased public awareness bode well for chiefs looking to gain support for local sprinkler ordinances.

By Patrick J. Coughlin, EFO, Director, Operation Life Safety

When it comes to saving lives, residential fire sprinklers are unsurpassed. Fire chiefs who used sprinklers to control their community fire risk early on are now reaping the benefits. If you haven't considered sprinklers before, or if you tried to win a sprinkler program but found the opposition too great, the barriers to acceptance are now less daunting. Now is the time to rethink residential sprinklers.

Conserve resources, save lives

The impact of flashover on fire department resources is well known. If firefighters begin their attack before flashover, the first-due units can usually handle it. When a fire has gone to flashover, more firefighters, apparatus and water are needed. The incident may even turn out to be "the big one." On average, it takes roughly half as many firefighters and apparatus to handle a pre-flashover fire. Thus, anything that keeps fires from reaching flashover conserves fire department resources.

Not as widely known is the impact of flashover on victims. "The U.S. Fire Problem Overview Report: Leading Causes and Other Patterns and Trends," recently published by the NFPA, shows a strong relationship between the stage of a fire and fire deaths. (See table, page 54.) When a fire goes to flashover, occupants who are in other rooms are eight times more likely to become victims. Thus, anything that keeps fires from reaching flashover will mean a major improvement in life safety.

Anyone looking for the best of both worlds - reducing residential fire deaths and doing it with fewer fire department resources - has to look no further than residential sprinklers. They're designed to control a fire before it reaches flashover. And even better, they operate early enough before flashover to keep the room of origin tenable to life.

Sprinklers with a UL residential listing differ from ordinary quick-response heads. The residential types have the same quick response, but they also spray a uniform pattern high on the walls instead of the typical umbrella spray pattern. This configuration directs most of the water along the wall,% where the heat plume usually is in residential settings, and as a result stops fire growth more quickly. Consequently, the temperature at the breathing level stays below 1500F, the oxygen level above 19%, the carbon monoxide level below 1% and smoke obscuration below an optical density of .5, which is clear enough for one to see across an average-sized room. This means increased survival rates for victims in the room of origin.

An abundance of data now supports the life safety capability of residential sprinklers and shows how they can reduce the demand on fire suppression resources.

Fire departments that enacted residential sprinkler ordinances in the mid'8os now have tens of thousands of sprinkler-protected homes. Many cities began realizing the benefits long before they had a significant number of systems installed. In some cases the size of the cities has doubled, and the fire departments are still the same size.

Some of these departments report zero fire deaths in sprinklered homes and substantially less property loss.

Installing residential sprinklers is like having a firefighter in every room. In areas of cities where sprinklers are used, stations can be located in an EMS orientation. This arrangement increases efficiency, but not at the expense of effectiveness. The citizens in these areas actually have a higher level of fire safety than areas with more fire stations but no residential sprinklers.

Although these superior life safety devices can rein in the growing costs of public fire protection, opposition from home builders and other barriers have frustrated the attempts of many fire chiefs to adopt them. Even though the phrase "more demands, less money" is practically a fire service mantra, o nly 6oo cities are using sprinkler requirements to help manage community fire =@w risks, according to the Operation Life Safety fire sprinkler database.

A lot has changed since sprinklers were introduced in 1981. In the beginning, statements about their effectiveness were only conjecture. The home building industry went on the attack and laid clouds of fear, uncertainty and doubt to mask the truth. They discouraged several cities from adopting sprinkler ordinances. It was initially difficult to fight the home builders because residential sprinklers didn't have a track record. They do now, however, and it's even better than the predictions.

Public awareness initiatives

It didn't help that the public was either unaware of sprinklers or accepted the erroneous portrayals in television sitcoms that were designed to encourage laughs, not to educate. Politicians were more comfortable rejecting sprinkler ordinances when public support was negligible.

Today, however, new initiatives from OLS, the sprinlder industry and the NFPA aim directly at increasing public awareness. Last year, OLs announced a new workshop for the fire service on residential sprinklers. The presentation consists of several units, including one that deals with sprinkler misperceptions and another that focuses on selling sprinklers. The sales presentation demonstrates the use of tried-and-true techniques to overcome sales resistance from the general public, policy-makers and traditional opponents. The NFPA has joined with the Amercan Fire Sprinkler Association and National Fire Sprinkler Association to pand to other form the Home Fire Sprinkler Coalition (<www.firesprinkler.org/hfsc>), whose mission is to educate the public about fire sprinklers in homes. The coalition debuted in Connecticut and is now operating in Oregon and Illinois with radio PSAs and print material. The coalition also conducts phone polls to gauge public awareness. The efforts will expand to othe staqtes as funds become avalable.

Failing costs

Cost has been one of the biggest barriers to wider acceptance of sprinkler programs. The problem has actually been three-fold.

First, accurate cost estijinates werer't available because very few sprinkler installers were in the residential market. Their projected costs were often based on commercial overhead from large commercial projects, and this inflated the estimates for homes.

Second, unreasonable requirements from water purveyors and building code departments can add fixed costs that make bids from low-cost installers uncompetitive. Many fire chiefs saw their chances for an ordinance sink when initial cost estimates of less than $1 per square foot ballooned to twice that and more after the other regulators piled on their requirements. In one southeastern jurisdiction, the charges for bringing a water line to a building actually exceeded the sprinkler contractor's bid for the sprinklers.

Problems with water purveyors and building departments still exist, but organizations that help fire departments with adopting sprinkler programs now have the experience to help them anticipate and overcome these problems.

The third cost dilemma was the absence of a competitive market. Fire chiefs who won residential sprinkler ordinances were challenged by the lack of installers, and the fact that most existing installers weren't organized to be competitive. But experience has shown that once a program is implemented, the market will react and prices will drop by as much as 50%.

When sprinkler contractors see the business potential, more of them will decide to specialize in 1- and 2-family homes. In fact, some commercial contractors have created new subsidiaries that can operate with lower overhead. One contractor reported that when he opened a residential sprinkler subsidiary he was able to drop his price from $2 to $.87 per square foot. Data from Scottsdale, Ariz., and from California, where more than 200 cities now have sprinkler ordinances, show that competition also pushes prices down. The costs in Scottsdale dropped from $1.14 in 1986 to $.57 by 1996.

Improved methods and materials forboth metallic and non-metallic sprinkler pipe also continue to reduce overall installation costs.

Multipurpose systems

Multipurpose sprinkler systems have been available for some time, but the lower cost of backflow prevention and recent changes to NFPA 13D, Installation of Sprinkler System in 1- and 2-Family Dwellings and Manufactured Homes, are making them more popular. A multi-purpose sprinkler system shares its pipe with the plumbing system. Using the same pipe for both systems means less pipe and fittings.

But perhaps the biggest cost saving these systems offer is the deletion of backflow prevention devices, which add about $6oo to the cost of a residential sprinkler system. Sprinkler systems have always had check valves to prevent the stagnant water in the system from backflowing into the potable water. Growing concern about contamination of potable water has caused health officials to push for a more sophisticated and expensive device called a reduced-pressure principal backflow preventer.

Multipurpose sprinkler systems eliminate the need for backflow prevention because the water in the sprinkler system isn't stagnant. Since the same water supplies the plumbing fixtures and the sprinklers, each time water flows in the plumbing system it refreshes the water in the sprinkler system.

There are two methods for installing multipurpose sprinkler systems. To distinguish between them, we'll call one a sprinkler/plumbing system and the other a plumbing/sprinkler system. The difference is in the pipe that's used. The sprinkler/plumbing system uses sprinkler pipe, and the plumbing/sprinkler system uses plumbing pipe.

At first glance, this might seem academic. Both systems share pipes, fittings and water supply, but there are two big differences: the pipe size and pressure rating. A lot of plumbing pipe is 1/2-inch in diameter. This smaller diameter pipe (sprinkler systems use 3/4-inch or larger pipe) has a higher friction loss, which means that the standard T sprinkler fitting can't be used. Although it supplies water from two directions, this isn't enough to overcome the friction loss in 1/2-inch pipe.

The plumbing)sprinkler system overcomes the friction loss problem by using a multipart fitting to supply additional flow. NFPA 13D requires that systems using 1/2-inch pipe supply water to each head from a minimum of three directions. The multipart fitting has fou ports, thus allowing water to be supplied from four directions. If the hydraulic calculations show that three ports will provide enough flow, the fourth port is used to supply a plumbing fixture or a port on another sprinkler fitting.

The resulting layout of pipe can look more like a web than a grid because of pipe going to the additional ports. It may be hard to believe that this design saves money because it appears to need a lot more pipe, but the real savings is in the fittings, which are the expensive parts of a sprinkler system.

The plumbing/sprinkler system reduces the number of fittings by using a manifold at the water service entrance. Each manifold outlet supplies one plumbing fixture, so each pipe does@t need joints to split the water supply between fixtures. The only breaks in a pipe are where there's a sprinkler fitting, and the water continues out of the fitting through the fourth port to a plumbing fixture.

Plumbers will install

The proponents of these systems want plumbers to install them, which will simplify things for the general contractor and further reduce installation costs by eliminating an additional sub-contractor on the job. The person who developed the plumbing/sprinkler multipurpose system expects training for plumbers to be available in the near future.

The plumbing/sprinkler system is just emerging from the prototype stage. Since the initial prototype was installed in Prince Georges County, Md., in i996, the components have gone through six generations of changes. Because the 1/2inch plumbing pipe wasn't yet a listed product, building officials had to accept it as an alternative material. The systems have been installed in several more homes, and a 25o-unit development with these systems is expected to begin construction this year in St. Helens, Ore.

The 1/2-inch pipe wasn't originally a listed product because plumbing pipe doesn't meet the 175PSi working pressure required for sprinkler pipe. Supporters of the system recently won an amendment to NFPA 13D allowing the pipe to have a lower-rated working pressure. They argued that the 175Psi requirement is unnecessary, because the pipe in a plumbing-to-sprinkler system will never receive a higher pressure than plumbing pipe. (Fire department connections aren't used in i- and 2-family homes). Now that the issue has been settled, the developer is also submitting the multipart fittings forUL listing.

Since these systems share the same pipe and water supply, a normal flow switch would trigger an alarm whenever high-flow plumbing fixtures are opened, but there are other alternatives.

First, since smoke alarms should always be installed in addition to sprinklers, the smoke alarms will alert occupants to a fire, so a flow switch could be eliminated. Some prospective customers, however, want a flow switch so their home can be monitored in their absence. In this case, the installer can set the delay mechanism in the flow switch for a time period longer than a normal flow. Also, the switch can be placed on a security system so it's disarmed when people are home and armed when they leave. Alternatives to flow switches may be introduced in the future, though none have reached the market yet.

The news about residential fire sprinklers is dramatic. Not only have they proved to be an effective life safety device, they significantly reduce the drain on fire department resources. Given the recent and substantial changes in the residential sprinkler market, now may be a good time to consider, or reconsider, residential fire sprinklers as part of your community fire risk management program.

Patrick Coughlin is the director of Operation Life Safety, a public/private partnership of theUSFA, IAFC and private industry whose mission is to reduce residential fire deaths and injuries by installing fire sprinklers and smoke alarms, and teaching fire-safe behavior. A graduate of the National Fire Academy's Executive Fire Officer Program, Coughlin has a bachelor's degree in sociology from Purdue University and a master's degree in sociology and public administration from the University of Minnesota.