• Appliances
• Campus and dorm fires
• Candles
• Carbon monoxide
• Children and fire
• Cooking
• Electrical safety
• Emergency preparedness
• Escape planning
• Fire extinguishers
• Fireworks
• Gas, propane, other fuels
• Heating
• High-rise buildings
• Homeland Security
• Home fire sprinklers
• Reports and statistics
• About automatic fire sprinklers
• Keeping Your Community Safe with Home Fire Sprinklers
• Intentional fires and arson
• Lightning
• Mine fires and explosions
• Natural disasters
• Nightclubs/assembly occupancies
• Nursing homes
• Older adults
• Other occupancies
• People with disabilities
• Seasonal safety
• Smoke alarms
• Smoking material-related fires
• Unintentional injuries
• Vehicle fires
• Wildland fires
• Project Holiday

Home fire sprinklers

Properly installed and maintained automatic fire sprinkler systems help save lives. Because fire sprinkler systems react so quickly, they can dramatically reduce the heat, flames, and smoke produced in a fire. Fire sprinklers have been around for more than a century, protecting commercial and industrial properties and public buildings. What most people don't realize is that the same life-saving technology is also available for homes, where roughly 84% of all civilian fire deaths occur.

• If you have a reported fire in your home, the risk of dying decreases by about 80 percent when sprinklers are present.
• People in homes with sprinklers are protected against significant property loss—sprinklers reduce the average property loss by 71% per fire.
• Sprinklers typically reduce the chances of dying in a home fire by one half to two thirds in any kind of property where they are used. Together with smoke alarms, sprinklers cut the risk of dying in a home fire 82 percent, relative to having neither.
• NFPA has no record of a fire killing more than two people in a completely sprinklered public assembly, educational, institutional or residential building where the system was working properly.
• Sprinklers are highly reliable. When present in the fire area, they operate in all but 7% of fires large enough to activate the system. Human error was a factor in almost all of the failures. The system was shut-off in almost two-thirds of the failures.

Source: NFPA's "U.S. Experience with Sprinklers and Other Fire Extinguishing Equipment" report by John R. Hall, Jr., January 2009.

Keeping Your Community Safe with Home Fire Sprinklers A tool kit for public educators There's no doubt that residential fire sprinklers represent the next generation in home fire safety. This comprehensive set of materials will help educate your community about the tremendous value of home fire sprinklers and motivate local municipalities to adopt codes requiring their installation in all new home construction.

NFPA does not test, label or approve any products
Updated: 5/09