With so many different companies out there all designing and building different bushfire sprinkler systems it’s hard for the consumer to know what is the best.
Some companies appear to have spent a lot of money inventing new types of sprinkler heads, the problem is that fire doesn’t care if you have the newest, flashiest sprinkler heads on your home, what matters is coverage and water volume used.
The mentality behind almost every company in the world is to develop a new product and have that product become the industry standard, with bushfire sprinkler systems it really doesn’t matter how complicated or innovated you design a sprinkler head it is still doing a very basic job, it simply sprays water.
World wide the garden reticulation industry has already matured, with many international companies spending millions of dollars a year on research and development of all sorts of sprinklers heads, these heads are designed for different types of weather conditions and can be easily adapted into a bushfire sprinkler system.
As mentioned before you need a bushfire sprinkler head to give good coverage and use the water volume required for the specific circumstance. If you have a home within meters of a heavily wooded area then you are going to need much more protection than if you have a home that is only going to become under ember attack.
A lot of systems might use 25,000+ litres of water per hour, you might need that volume of water or more if you are going to have direct flame contact but its too much for a standard sized home if it’s just ember attack your worried about. For ember attack you can drag out a system to run for easily 3 hours on 25,000 litres, now you don’t want to wait until the last minute to turn the system on but you shouldn’t be waiting until the last minute to do anything in a bushfire!
The trick to low volume bushfire sprinkler systems is to make sure you have adequate protection from embers, instead of using “butterfly” sprinklers that have only a few meters of coverage and use 20-30 litres of water per minute, install “impact” sprinklers, some “impacts” might use 15 litres and have a coverage of 10-11 meters. After running “impact” sprinklers for a few minutes on your roof everything is well and truly wet up there and the gutters are full.
10 “butterflies” might use 300 litres per minute, where as you could get adequate coverage with only 3-4 “impact” sprinklers that only use 45 – 60 Litres per minute. Over an hour your saving a massive 15,000 litres.
Don’t forget the ember protection system for all those spots under the roof line that pose a threat, all those little gaps under the eaves, if you haven’t blocked them up, are potential entry points your favourite chair on the veranda, pot plants etc all are flammable when embers land on them, the spray system protects against these dangers and using existing low flow technology from the reticulation industry will help you save 1,000′s of litres of water per hour.
If you have a standard size home, only need protection from ember attack and have a swimming pool or a 30,000 litre tank then water shouldn’t be an issues you are going to need to worry about running out of fuel in the pump!
I really do need to stress that if you have a home that has trees and flammable plants against or close to your house then you are going to have direct flame contact during a bushfire, these situations require all copper piping and lots of water, I would even recommend a perimeter bushfire sprinkler system around your property. If this is you, then I have to stress the importance of a 20 meter buffer area around your home, I understand the desire to live “in” the bush and if your not going to get a proper buffer then its going to cost you one way or another, either on a bushfire sprinkler system or during a bushfire when you lose your home.
