Sprinkler room space heater

[MisterCMK]

Whats wrong with a heat detector in the room?

 

[nhfire77]

Whats wrong with a heat detector in the room?

Well, unless its tied into the heater, whats the point? The sprinkler head popped, not a smoke. Adding a heat detector to shut down the unit I assume you meant?

 

[MisterCMK]

Well, unless its tied into the heater, whats the point? The sprinkler head popped, not a smoke. Adding a heat detector to shut down the unit I assume you meant?

A RoR heat should trip before that sprinkler head ops. I suppose you could shut down the heater but if the heat goes off and the dialer calls out there will be people there soon enough.

 

[kwired]

I'm curious why the t-stat needs to be tamperpoof. With a room that small I can't imagine that there is anything other then the riser in there, in which case the door might get opened once a year. Who's going to tamper with it?

In regards to your heaters. I like to install two heaters in that situation on seperate circuits. The t-stats get set at 50 and 40 degrees. It serves two purposes. ONE if the first heater can't keep up ona really cold night the second makes up the differance. TWO if one fails and trips a circuits the second one takes over. Assuming this room will only be visited one a year for an inspection, how is anyone acutally going to discover that the heaters aren't working?

Unless very thorough with any inspection the first one failing likely will not ever be noticed until the second on also fails and the room freezes.

this is an insurance job because someone gained access to this room and turned the heat up and caused the sprinkler to open....per the fire marshalls report.

Here's the fix from the property association.

Install a tamper proof thermostat and heater that is better suited for sprinkler room/commercial area.

Who gets to say what is better suited? baseboard is possibly about the best thing for this - no mechanical parts to fail just thermostat(s) that you will have on other heating units also. Some type of temperature monitor for both high and low temperature sounds more important to me than trying to find some other type of heater. You could spend thousands on a heater or you could put in a 100 watt lamp and possibly have enough heat for that small of a space depending on how much losses there are.

 

[mtfallsmikey]

I have small Trane wall mounted unit heaters w/built-in t-stats in the fire pump rooms, but have that "commercial" look to them...

 

[nhfire77]

A RoR heat should trip before that sprinkler head ops. I suppose you could shut down the heater but if the heat goes off and the dialer calls out there will be people there soon enough.

ROR is 15 degrees over 60 seconds. A heater would slowly heat the room. The fixed temp element would trip at 135 or 194 degrees. So at 135 you are calling the fire department for a malfunctioning heater. I agree its a fire hazard. Of course most likely after a few of those the FD would require you to actually deal with the problem. After typing this it got me thinking:

What about a thermostat tied to the FACP, that when it reached say 100 degrees, a supervisory trips.

I have a sprinkler water tower control room that has two very large heaters in it that keep the pipes warm. By code there is a 40 degree supervisory sensor to catch a possible freeze. This july I was testing the system. I found the heater Tstats had malfunctioned and the room was 150 degrees. So I'm thinking that should be a requirement for sprinkler rooms that have heaters. I might have to submit a proposal.