Fire Hazards - Sprinklers

[BobL]

Yesterday I bought a Seatainer to use as a wood drying shed. As a fire preventative measure I would like to add a couple of sprinklers that are activated by fire - anyone have any leads as to where one purchases these?

How hot does it have to get before those heat activated ones trigger? Maybe smoke detection might be better than temp as it will get pretty hot inside. This measure is not because I expect it to catch fire but the local yobs have a habit of piling up rubbish next to seatainers and starting fires.

Thanks

[DavidG]

See

[BobL]

Thanks David. I see they have 4 types of sprinklers rated between 59 and 93oC. I am going to get some temp/humidty sensors from work and will put one inside and outside the seatainer to see what they get up to.

Cheers

[BobL]

Here is some interesting Temperature (oC) and Relative Humidity (RH %)data about my seatainer over a 7 day cycle. I bought some USB portable temperature/humidity sensors and put one inside the container on top of a pile of slabs (blue line), and one I left outside the container but it failed to trigger (still getting the hang of the software) but managed to get local daily min (red rectangles) and max (Black rectangles) temps for the last week from the weather bureau.



It looks like the temperature in the container is consistently about 5 - 10 oC above the outside temp. I was hoping for a bit more but maybe that a good thing. The weather here is quite cool at this time of the year and this weather pattern is more like what we see in spring and autumn. It will be interesting to see what happens when we hit 40oC

It's interesting to see the RH outside varies by around 50% during the day/night cycle but inside it varies by only 30%and doesn't go less than about 40% . I have read on the web that this rise in RH during the night helps the wood recover from the stress of drying out in the day.

[dennford]

Bob,
A couple of points. Some of those sprinklers are designed to operate at high pressure, they are backed up by a pump system. So I don't know how they would fare on mains pressure. Secondly it is recomended that you have a minimum clearance between the top of your stored materials and the sprinkler, otherwise the material may interfere with the spray pattern. (I think about 2metres) and a container is only a little over that hieght, so that doesn't leave much storage space.
If you really think fire could be a problem something that may be worth considering is what we used to call an MJC or multiple jet control. It is a sensor that can release one or more jets at once but are normally used with a gas or powder system. The idea would be to have one or more sensors in your container that activate a co2 cylinder or similar.

Denn

[Bob38S]

Yesterday I bought a Seatainer to use as a wood drying shed. ..............


. This measure is not because I expect it to catch fire but the local yobs have a habit of piling up rubbish next to seatainers and starting fires.

Thanks

I presume that it is on your property - how are these ferals getting close enough to set the fires?

Big dog / electric fence etc are probably starting to look good - my original reaction would have been insurance by Winchester but this of course is not allowed as the ferals could get hurt - and we wouldn't want that, now would we?