I don’t think that’s really contradictory though. I’ve lived through many cases of the sprinklers being set off accidentally (frozen pipe burst, rc-helicopter blade impact, and idiots using it as a clothes hook) and “some water” isn’t the phrase I would use. I think it’s more like if someone threw a bathtub from the ceiling every minute until someone could shut it off? That can be pretty costly to mitigate afterwards—but then I’ve also seen houses where nothing of it could be saved. As your contractor said, one of those is probably much better.
Mine are flush with the ceiling, there's nothing to hook onto. Just regular plumbing pipes can freeze, too. But the sprinkler pipes all run in interior walls - it's the ones in exterior walls that are likely to freeze. (I've had floods from frozen pipes in a non-sprinkled house - the pipes were in an exterior wall.)
Anyhow, at the time I did some research and found that nobody had died in a fire in the US in a room that had working sprinklers. It's pretty darn compelling.
> I’ve lived through many cases of the sprinklers being set off accidentally (frozen pipe burst, rc-helicopter blade impact, and idiots using it as a clothes hook) and “some water” isn’t the phrase I would use. I think it’s more like if someone threw a bathtub from the ceiling every minute until someone could shut it off?
That's why i specifically mentioned double-interlock preaction systems, where if someone hits the sprinkler and causes it to open, the only thing that comes out is compressed air (and a trouble/supervisory alarm sounds).
