What is a residential sprinkler?
The residential sprinkler was the first sprinkler to incorporate the new fast response technology. It was developed in the late 1970s in conjunction with federally funded research into a low-cost residential sprinkler system. Research showed that in order to make relatively small domestic water supplies effective for sprinkler protection, and to control a residential fire before small rooms could fill up with toxic smoke, a sprinkler needed to be considerably more sensitive to heat than the standard sprinklers. The needed residential sprinklers were developed by sprinkler manufacturers while appropriate product testing criteria were being developed by Underwriters Laboratories and appropriate installation rules were being developed by the NFPA Committee on Automatic Sprinklers. The result is that there are now listed residential sprinklers which can be installed in conformance with NFPA 13D and, in some cases, NFPA 13. The listed residential sprinklers are tested not only for fast resp
