Home fire sprinklers

Properly installed and maintained automatic fire sprinkler systems help save lives. Because fire sprinkler systems react so quickly, they can dramatically reduce the heat, flames and smoke produced in a fire. Fire sprinklers have been around for more than a century, protecting commercial and industrial properties and public buildings, such as hotels and hospitals and high-rises. What most people don't realize is that the same life-saving technology that protects these buildings is also available for homes, where 80 percent of all fire deaths occur.

• When sprinklers are present, the chances of dying in a fire are reduced by one-half to three-fourths and the average property loss per fire is cut by one-half to two-thirds, compared to fires where sprinklers are not present.
• Sprinklers typically reduce the chances of dying in a home fire by one half to two thirds in any kind of property where they are used. Together with smoke alarms, sprinklers cut the risk of dying in a home fire 82 percent, relative to having neither.
• NFPA has no record of a fire killing more than two people in a completely sprinklered public assembly, educational, institutional or residential building where the system was working properly.
• Sprinklers are highly reliable. When present in the fire area, they operate in all but 7% of fires large enough to activate the system. Human error was a factor in almost all of the failures. The system was shut-off in almost two-thirds of the failures.
• Only one or two sprinkler heads were activated in 81% of the fires with wet pipe sprinkler systems operating and in 56% of the fires with dry pipe systems operating.

Source: NFPA's "U.S. Experience with Sprinklers and Other Fire Extinguishing Equipment " report by John R. Hall, Jr., January 2009.