Scrimping on sprinklers can cost more than money

The FPA’s principal consultant and sprinkler expert Dale Kinnersley outlines the dangers of cutting costs with sprinklers

The Fire Protection Association (FPA) is one of the leading experts for sprinkler system inspections, head, pipework, and watermist testing. Alongside other industry bodies, the organisation has been vocal in lobbying government, emphasising the importance of making sprinklers compulsory by law. The FPA are authors of the LPC Rules for Automatic Sprinklers and have the facility at a purpose-built laboratory to conduct sprinkler system tests to improve current LPC Technical Bulletins.

Every year thousands of people are injured in fires and hundreds lose their lives. It is widely acknowledged within the fire safety industry that many of these tragedies could have been avoided with sprinkler installation. Sprinklers are instrumental in minimising the risk of fire and can help save lives as well as providing property protection and business continuity. They provide protection from fire damage and give people a better chance of evacuating a building when there is a fire. Sprinklers help save money too, as their effective use reduces the scale and cost of potential fire damage, as well as limiting the potential knock-on effects for local communities. Sprinkler systems allow most fires to be controlled, with some being extinguished before fire and rescue services even arrive on the scene.

Sprinkler systems work by reacting to heat and, when activated by the high temperature caused by a fire, they will operate and discharge water directly over the fire to effectively and efficiently suppress it. A fire can spread frighteningly fast where no sprinkler system is fitted. In just three to four minutes, it can push temperatures towards 900°C and quickly spread throughout a building. Where sprinklers are installed, the sprinkler closest to the fire is activated first, when it detects the temperature reaching 68°C, and it will release water to effectively suppress the fire. Following this initial activation, additional sprinklers will only activate if the fire spreads. However, this again will be controlled by the sprinklers to provide cooling and fire control.

As part of the Fire Protection Association's continuing commitment to increase fire safety awareness across the built environment, a number of informative feature articles are available to read on our website. You can read the full article here .