Having commercial fire sprinkler systems for your business is critical when it comes to owning a business. A good fire protection company will be able to offer you different types of fire suppression systems depending on the type of building you have, the equipment inside and the risk factor. Your chosen fire protection company will know which fire protection system a restaurant needs as opposed to an office building, etc. Let’s look at a few facts of fires to show you just how desperately you need to make sure that you are covered.
- There is an average of 15 deaths and 150 injuries each year, in hotel and motel fires alone.
- The average cost of hotel and motel fires property loss every year is about $76 million.
- In a span of four years, fire departments across America had responded to about 6,240 fires that were inside or on the premises of a health care provider.
- In a recent study, confined cooking fires in medical facilities by themselves accounted for 55% of the times of fires they have.
- In non medical facilities, it was found that electrical malfunctions was the leading cause of fires.
Now that you know a few of the things that can happen when you don’t have a fire suppression system installed, here are some of the benefits of having one.
- In commercial business that have a large oven, a non chemical fire suppression system is known to be effective about 96% of the time.
- One study stated that sprinklers worked 91% of the time to put out fires that were large enough to actually activate the sprinkler system. This doesn’t include fires that were in buildings that were under construction or buildings that didn’t have a sprinkler system installed by a fire protection company.
- If you have a chemical system installed then usually the fire will be contained as soon as the concentration of CO2 in the air gets to 20% or lower.
- The National Fire Protection Association (NFPA) doesn’t have any records of more than two people dying in a fire where the sprinkler system function properly.
- Using both sprinklers and an alarm, which are triggered as a warning and then the sprinklers automatically could save lives, avoid injuries and limit property damage by at least 50%.
- Warehouse fires have gone down a lot over the past three decades because of the enforcement of fire suppression systems by a fire protection company. Specifically, they have gone from about 4,700 back in the year 1980 down to an average of 1,200 in the year 2011.
- If there is any kind of suppression system activated, it doesn’t matter where the fire is located; if the fire is detected soon enough to give a 10 to 15 minute warning before the end of the incipient stage of the fire, then the fire department should be able to avoid a lot of the damage.
Another reason that you should have a fire suppression system installed is that it is actually the law in some areas. In a room that is less than 2500 square feet, it’s actually a requirement for an early warning fire detection system to be installed. Some insurance companies will not agree to cover your business if you will not have some sort of fire protection system put in your building.
Being able to prevent a fire and detect is early is crucial to making sure that everyone and everything stands a chance. Everyone needs to have a fire alarm and fire suppression from huge commercial organizations like data centers that have so much critical business information about the world to small start up companies.
However, one of the main problems even when people do have fire suppression systems installed is that they do not keep up on them. Almost half of the chemical systems fail because they are not properly maintained. If you don’t keep up on your system, it is basically as bad as not having one at all. If you end up having a fire and it is found that you did not do the proper maintenance of your system, your insurance company will likely see that as grounds for denying your claim. Don’t let that happen to you, it could be devastating to your company and its employees and employees’ families.