They either just passed or are about to pass legislation requiring fire sprinklers in residential highrises.
I have one question: can the people in the apartments turn off the sprinklers if they start going off in a false alarm?
When your smoke detector starts going off for no reason, you can turn it off by removing the battery or flipping the circuit breaker, depending on how it's set up. In my apartment, I have a mute button for the fire alarm (I can still hear the alarm coming from the hallway) so it doesn't make me go deaf when there's a false alarm and I don't have to evacuate. I would very much like something similar for anything that might be installed in my apartment.
I've been googling around to see if this exists, and all I'm finding are reassurance from sprinkler companies that they don't produce THAT much water, and that they really won't go off unless there actually is a fire, honest, we promise, coupled with loud trumpeting of the fact that insurance companies will give you discounts if you have sprinklers.
But that's not reassuring. I've never been in a fire, but I've been in plenty of false alarms. Several times I've been in buildings where the fire alarm went off because of plumbing problems. I can't trust that sprinklers will work more reliably than that. The fact that insurance might compensate me for any damage is immaterial; insurance money won't make my mattress dry and fit to sleep in that night, it won't save irreplacable-because-of-sentimental-value stuffed animals that live on my bed when no one else is there, it won't replace the data on my computer, and it won't make a suitable assortment of size 11 narrow width shoes commercially available.
I'd be happy to sacrifice any of these things to water damage if the alternative was being burned down in a fire, but to lose them to a false alarm would be unacceptable. Please don't anyone install sprinklers in my apartment unless you can also give me an off switch.
5 comments:
Sprinkler only go off if there is fire. They are heat activated and DO NOT just go off. There is NO on/off switch so the fire dept. can determine if the fire is out, not the occupant.
And smoke detectors are supposed to be smoke activated, but we've all had a smoke detector go off for no reason. The building alarm is supposed to go off when someone pulls an alarm or when a smoke detector has been going for for a certain period of time, but my buildings have had them go off when there's a plumbing problem. Car alarms are supposed to go off when someone touches the car, but there are a few in my neighbourhood that go off when there's a thunderstorm.
Information about how they're designed to work is insufficient reassurance. I also want a backup for when there's some unforeseen glitch in the system. Most emergency systems merely inconvenience people when they are triggered by accident, but sprinklers would cause lasting damage to people's homes and possessions. To ask people to bear that risk without any recourse to shut the system off should something go wrong is unacceptable.
There is no "off" switch. They do malfunction from time to time regardless of what fire departments and sprinkler manufacturers say. And if there is a malfunction, they spray disgusting, black oily ooze left over from the installation process at first until fresh water flows through the pipes. The answer is don't buy new and you won't have to worry about it. They will only be putting them into new buildings, not retrofitting old ones.
Great, now I need a cost-benefit calculation of whether/how much the sprinkler annoyance outweighs the other benefits of buying new.
They are heat activated and DO NOT just go off.
Yeah, right. They're the only things on earth that never malfunction.
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