Unless you live next door to the fire brigade, you won’t find better fire protection than home fire sprinkler systems. Here are a few reasons why home fire sprinklers provide the best fire protection available.

They respond quickly. It could take the fire brigade ten minutes, twenty minutes, or more to arrive at your home, hook up their apparatus to a water source, and begin fighting the fire after you call them—and in that time, it’s easy for a fire to spread out of control. Firefighters know that every second counts, but traffic and distance can prevent them from responding as quickly as they need to.

With home fire sprinkler systems, you don’t have that problem. When a fire starts, it sends a plume of hot air towards the ceiling—activating the heat-sensitive seal on a home fire sprinkler system. The moment that happens, the residential sprinkler system responds.

They don’t malfunction. Approximately 14% of smoke alarms fail to respond in case of fire. If you forget to replace the batteries, that raises the failure rate. Home sprinkler systems don’t require you to remember to replace batteries, and the failure rate is very low—approximately one in 500,000 home sprinkler systems fails because of manufacturing defects. Overall, home fire sprinklers are much more reliable than other types of fire protection.

They respond automatically. Fire extinguishers can also put out the fire before it grows out of control—if you can get to the fire extinguisher in time and know how to operate it. Some fire extinguishers only control certain types of fires, and many models need to be replaced or recharged once every ten years or so. In addition, fire extinguishers require you to stand in close proximity to a fire, putting you at risk of injury or death—and if you can’t get to the fire extinguisher in time or are blocked from accessing it because of the fire, you’re out of luck.

Home sprinkler systems don’t require you to operate them manually or get dangerously close to a fire. They protect you automatically—your only job is to get yourself and your family out of the house safely.

They control the fire effectively. Approximately 90% of fires can be controlled with a single sprinkler head, and that’s because home sprinkler systems respond quickly enough to stop the fire before it grows. Residential fire sprinkler systems respond more quickly than fire brigades, and they extinguish a fire more quickly than you can with a fire extinguisher. When it comes to fire protection, every second counts.

Home fire sprinkler systems respond faster, malfunction less often, and operate more safely than any other method of fire protection—including the fire brigade. There’s no question that residential fire sprinkler systems save lives; throughout the U.K., not one fire-related fatality has ever been reported in a home with a fire sprinkler system installed. They may be more expensive to install than a smoke alarm, but they provide better fire protection as well. If you really want to protect your home and family from fire, installing a home fire sprinkler system is easily the best option you have.