Quote:
Originally posted by AXiD670
I wish, when they installed the brand-new sprinklers in the residence halls on my undergrad campus, they had installed something like that. It would have prevented many false alarms.
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You still would have had false alarms with the smoke detectors. Sprinklers can also have false alarms. That is why they usually are not required. The Pa state house even talked about making them mandadory a few years ago but it got shot down because of the problems. A sprinkler is basically a just a water line. At each fitting/sprinker head there is a small amount of lead solder. When the room gets hot the lead melts and water comes out.
There are also problems with sprinklers. The heads can be set off just by bumping them or something as simple as a helium balloon. Then the whole house gets flooded with water. How is that for a false alarm? At DeltaSigStan's school the sprinklers accidentally went off the first month the new fraternities were built. I'll guess there was probably a few hundred k in damage. Then there is the problem with reliability. Central Sprinkler that happens to be in Pa used to be the nations largest manufacturer of sprinklers. They had to recall 35 million sprinkler heads a few years ago. I think they declared bankruptcy.