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What Are Water Mist Systems
What Are Water Mist Systems
Lee Kaiser
Water mist systems are becoming an increasingly popular alternative to total flood
carbon dioxide systems, which can be dangerous to workers. With low, medium, and
high pressure systems available, water mist systems can do everything from creating
a fire suppressing fog to replacing traditional sprinkler systems. In this video, fire
protection expert Lee Kaiser explains the basics of this safe and water-efficient fire
suppression system.
VIDEO TRANSCRIPT
Lee: "So now, if CO2 systems are dangerous, what's an alternative to that? What can
we apply in its place? Well, that brings us to the point of talking about water mist
systems. Water mist systems are one technology that can replace CO2 systems,
so we'll start to talk through that. If you've never heard about a water mist system,
water mist systems discharge water typically at high pressure through specialized
nozzles to make a mist or even a fog of water in a space, and that fog has
certain properties that help it to extinguish fires. And we'll explain those. So all water
mist systems result in very small droplets into the space or around the thing that they
are protecting.
Intermediate pressure is between 175 psi and 500 psi, and then high
pressure systems, 500 psi and up. So the highest pressure water mist system I
know of is around 2,300 psi of pressure, so really high pressure system, specialized
tubing or piping that's used for that. Now, there are differences between water mist
systems and the droplet sizes that they produce, so typically the smaller the water
droplet size the better it is at extinguishing a hot fire. Larger droplets can
work faster on lower temperature fires, but they all work for the systems that they're
approved for or listed for.
Variance in the water supply sources. Most water mist systems use two things.
They use stainless steel pipe, because we don't want it to rust in there. Any rust or
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What Are Water Mist Systems?
particulate in the piping system will get to the nozzles and gum them up, and we don't
want that to happen, and then we just use tap water because we don't want the
water to become corrosive as it sits there and waits for a fire to happen.
Droplet Sizes
When you look at droplet sizes for water mist systems, one benchmark is that the
droplets should be less than 1,000 microns in diameters. So for a system to be
considered water mist, it has to have droplets smaller than 1,000 microns, which is
the thickness of a dime. Okay? So most sprinkler systems have droplet sizes
produced around 5,000 microns, and water mist is less than 1,000. Intermediate
pressure water mist systems tend to produce around 300, maybe even 500
micron droplets, and then high pressure systems around 50, maybe to 100,
150 microns in diameter, and so the concept with water mist is we take a given
volume of water and break it down into smaller and smaller packets. When we do
that, we increase the surface area of that water available to be exposed to the heat
of the fire, so it can do some certain things.
Want to implement a water mist system? Click here to talk with an expert and find
out if water mist is right for your mission critical facility.
Topics: Fire Protection Services, Suppression, Fire Protection Systems, Video Blogs,
Nationwide
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