All About the Flow
Complete Fire Protection, Inc. stresses plumbing checks
For developers and architects, making sure every building is equipped with an effective fire safety system is one of the basic tenets of producing a well-designed commercial project. In addition, code compliance is both a routine and an essential part of doing business in the construction industry.
But once the tenants move in and a business-as-usual mindset takes hold, industry insiders say maintaining sprinkler systems often becomes more of an afterthought. Much like a homeowner’s neglectful take on the property insurance policy that’s collected dust in his strongbox, it can be a case of “out of sight, out of mind.”
“We see a lot of problems in old buildings, although there are plenty of deficiencies to be found in newer structures too,” says Jim Courier, Field Operations Manager of Sunnyvale, Texas-based Complete Fire Protection, Inc.“ And it’s usually because the people who are there don’t know their system and don’t realize they’re supposed to be doing these maintenance checks. You won’t get a letter from the city or the state fire marshal saying, ‘Hey, it’s time for you to be testing your sprinkler system.’ It’s something you’re supposed to already know to do.”
Courier’s colleague Raina Webb, an Estimator/Designer with the company, concurs, noting that it’s a familiar theme encountered on a daily basis. Hence, Complete Fire Protection’s fire safety sprinkler system specialists spend time each day guiding commercial property managers and their agents through the intricacies of checking, testing and maintaining their sprinkler systems.
“I think it’s just a fact of life that people don’t think much about their life safety systems until something goes wrong and they need it,” Webb says. “Of course, then it’s too late.”
Although the lion’s share of the company’s business involves installations of sophisticated sprinkler systems in facilities ranging from municipal buildings to hospitals, inspectors like Courier take service calls every day and go out to regional properties to detect and troubleshoot problems—all while walking owners through the process of keeping a system and all its moving parts operational.
The Magic of Maintenance
“If you’re adding a sprinkler system to your building, but you don’t know how to do your basic maintenance checkups on it, then you can have some very expensive building ornaments that don’t do what they were built to do,” Courier says. He quips that those “cute little sprinkler heads on the ceiling might look terrific, but they won’t function.”
Knowledge is power, he adds, and maintenance is key. The team at Complete Fire Protection is geared to handle as much hand-holding as clients need to achieve a comfort level with fire safety code requirements, system maintenance checks and test procedures. But, Courier admits that people’s eyes sometimes glaze over when he or his colleagues start spreading their wisdom about how to conduct inspections of the sprinkler system components.
“Every system is different. Your building might have a wet-pipe system—which is the most common system type—or a dry-pipe system, and they operate differently and have different requirements,” he says. “But, people need to remember that this is basic plumbing, so all I have to do is show people all the parts and explain what everything does. Then it gets a lot easier for them to understand what needs to be done.”
Noting that “there are things to do weekly, monthly, quarterly and annually,” Courier advises property managers and their representatives to keep a checklist to stay abreast of the scheduled maintenance checks required to keep sprinkler systems in pristine shape.
Be a Know-It-All
“It’s not that unusual for us to go to work on a sprinkler system, and then we go to fill it up, and we’ll discover there’s no water,” Courier says. “That means that somewhere down the line, the water supply has been shut off and nobody knows about it or has even checked for that. No one can tell us where, how or even when that happened.”
The lesson here, he adds, is to “be aware of what’s going on with your system.” Someone might add a building in a retail development, for instance, and shut the water down during construction, then forget to turn it back on.
Courier recounts a recent service call received from property managers of a building where there had been a fire next door and a malfunction was detected. The building’s sprinkler system had been inspected by another entity just a few months before. A test of the main drain revealed that a water valve had been shut off and the system’s water pressure was at zero. He theorizes the water was turned off but not turned back on when modifications were made by a municipality’s waterworks department on a nearby street.
“The shocker is that this had clearly happened a long time ago, like maybe a couple of years, and nobody knew about it,” he says. “It even went undetected with an earlier inspection by a competitor. These sorts of things happen all the time, so the takeaway is to know your sprinkler system, know where the main components are, and know how to isolate them and shut them down. You need to know what they need to operate and how they operate.”
Post-Renovation Reevaluations
Remodeling is a common culprit when things go amiss because specifying the right quantity of sprinklers for fire safety can be a “numbers game.” Sometimes a system is working just fine and the property managers may also be diligent about conducting checks and maintaining an efficient system, Courier explains. Then, a new tenant moves in and decides to make a slight adjustment—changing the floor plan or making a seemingly minimal modification—and creates an “under-sprinkled” safety issue.
“On a recent annual inspection, we found that a new tenant decided to break up the suites, putting in a little wall so that clients couldn’t walk into the back office,” he says. “Just putting that wall up created a different fire area, though, and that affected the fire coverage of the sprinkler system. So, if that area initially had 10 sprinklers, now it requires 12. People often think, ‘Oh, I’m just putting up a little wall, I don’t have to go to the fire department or pull a permit.’ And then we come through for an annual inspection and find all these deficiencies.”
Avoiding the Nasties
Sludge, rust and smelly water are unpopular arrivals when a sprinkler system isn’t routinely flushed and the water becomes stagnant. Courier says that when water smells, people are typically surprised and curious (as well as disgusted).
“You’re supposed to change out the water in the system as often as possible. One of the maintenance tasks you’re supposed to do on a sprinkler system is flow water through it,” he says. “As an owner’s rep, you would go out to the furthest point of the system and open the auxiliary drain and let water flow through your system. That’s an important maintenance function, because the stagnant water can harbor bacteria that can eat away at your pipes and damage the system. If the water is just sitting there, [the bacteria] gets a chance to grow [in] the habitat.”
Courier notes that an important aspect of running a successful flush is to contact the building’s monitoring service company because there’s always a risk that the system-wide maintenance effort might activate the fire alarm. The monitoring service company will need to be alerted to know NOT to call the fire department if the alarm is activated during the maintenance procedure.