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Installing Halon Fire Supression System at Home?
swmagazine asks: "The house my family is building just burn down 2 weeks before competition. Now that the insurance is paying out some money, I am seriously considering installing Halon system at home because the house comes with a server room and I will be having at least 10 computers running in the house. I would like to know if anyone has experience with Halon system as well as the feasibility of installing such system at home." The possibility that your computer could conceivably be a fire hazard is extremely low on newer machines. Older machines, without the proper protection, may overheat, and that might cause problems. Might such a system minimize the damage posed by a house-fire, or are they too expensive (or too ineffective) for the average home owner?
And not for your lungs either! It's forbidden in Sweden. On a side note I've heard a tale you voice sounds like Chip for a week if you take a good breathe of it.
Well since no one, that I know of, makes ozone depleting Halon anymore, you may want to look at an FM-200 system. I still think this is a bit excessive for home use, most systems I've seen are more than >$10k after purchase and installation.
halon is un-breathable. this means that if someone is in the house when the system releases its gas, that that person/animal is dead. it starves the air of oxygen.
I wouldn't do it.
the best prevention is to simply watch what the heck is going on with all the electrical stuff in your house and to simply not be careless. sure, all fires aren't preventable, but 99.999% are. Insurance and a good data backup solution will take care of the rest.
I am pretty sure halon is illegal to install in the US; I think existing installations are good until they discharge and then must be replaced with something else. Also, imagine the liability if it went off (kids playing around unsupervised, some electrical fault) and whomever was home didn't know to run away, or slept through it? Just go with sprinklers.
Last time I piloted an M1A1 Abrams tank, great stress was placed on the oxygen-displacing effects of the halon fire suppression system. I would have the same concerns about a household halon system that I had in the Abrams. ex. You're in the most central part of your household and the halon system goes off. You're now [however] far from your front door and have what air you had in your lungs. Considerations for what might happen if it went off at night. Kids in the house? Hmmm..
TiFox
-- I'd say your post was about 3 monkeys, 18 minutes.
Sorry, my knowledge of halon systems comes only from Terminator 2.
your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
As the gentleman before me noted Halon is not a good thing to be around. It will displace any oxygen and thus if you tried to crawl out you could suffocate. If you are truely concerned about a fire hazard build yourself a nice copper lined concrete box (concrete board and copper sheathing can be found at any home center. neither is flamable at any temperature that a computer is going to ever get to (even if they themselves were on fire). The reason halon is used is not in any way to stop computers from catching other things on fire but rather to protect equipment that is in a burning facility.
.. try this link for example Halon Replacement
Halon systems are being decommisioned worldwide
Bad Panda! No Bamboo for you! In matters of importance ACs will not be responded to. Want to say something critical,OK
I have one word for you:
Sprinklers.
Actually I have many words for you, but that is the most important.
You must understand why server rooms use halon rather than water. Remember the fire triad: fuel, oxygen, heat. Rob the fire of any of those and it goes out.
Halon robs the fire of oxygen. Water robs the fire of heat (and to a lesser extent oxygen).
Halon is used in server rooms because you don't want the water damage to the servers. Otherwise water is MUCH better at putting a fire out, because you can use LOTS of it.
Now, if you are building a new house, and you want to reduce the risk of a fire burning it down, put in sprinklers everywhere in the house - it will be a LOT cheaper to set up and maintain than Halon, and it will do a better job.
Now, if you are going to build a dedicated server room in the house, then maybe you put a halon bottle in it, but not for the whole house.
www.eFax.com are spammers
Dear swmagazine:
Your recent posting to the underground hacking network "slash-period" regarding Halon has been detected by our information bots. Halon is on the list of 638,931 chemicals maintained by the Ministry of Homeland Security as potentially lethal to Americans. Please report immediately to our facility in Guantonimo Bay for processing while we investigate your interest in this chemical. Do not inform friends and co-workers of your reassignment.
Sincerely,
Thomas Ridge
John Ashcroft
watch this
Consider the ordinary building sprinkler system. There's a reason you can't put up a new public building without one: they're damned effective. But they're also expensive. I don't think I've ever heard of them in a single-family structure.
Ok, you can no longer (I'm assuming you're in the USA) get halon, as it is harmful to the ozone layer. What's now used for this purpose is called Inergen. Furthermore, despite all the howling by everyone about the risk of suffocation, keep in mind that it will take a bit of time for an entire home to become filled with the stuff, and the fact that any professionally installed system includes alerts to let you know when the system is activated. Between the warning you get, the air in your lungs and the air that has not been displaced yet, you can be just fine. This kind of system has been put in many types of facilities in all sorts of different ways, and unless it's done incredibly wrong, by no means will it turn your home into a big gas chamber :)
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
I must be outdated or something but what is Halon. I can only guess that it contains halogens. If so wouldn't it be reactive?
Why don't you guys have friends or journals?
P.S.: Upon your arrival at our Guantonimo Bay processing center you will be required to provide five (5) forms of identification. You must also provide them with your assigned processing identification code. Your identification code is
swmag_4638391_chemweap_983
Failure to provide this information upon check-in will extend the duration of your processing by approximately 6-18 months.
watch this
If you are building in a fire prone area consider partially or majorly covering the building in earth. (A side benefit is your heating energy provider will hate you.) If the fire was an "accident" then you most definetly have a materials problem. Wood, while very attractive and cheap to buy & work with, is fuel. eg: Would you use compressed "fire retarded" straw or paper as a building material? (I wouldn't) It is supposed to be more fire-resistant than wood.!?
Consider naturally inert and fire resistant materials like concrete & bricks.
Then high risk/expense/maintainance fire suppression systems like halon become pointless. Ordinary smoke detectors can then be sufficient.
Using halon is such overkill and may even accidentally kill one of you loved ones. It's like having loaded 9mm handguns at convienent, accessable places around the (wood & paper) house to combat a roach problem when all you had to do was clean up your filth.
--
"we live in a post-ideological world..." - Billy Bragg.
You should only install a halon system in your house if you value your property more highly than your family's lives. If you don't have a problem with causing your family to die by suffocation, go for it.
But then again, I could be wrong.
http://www.healthsafetyinfo.com/news/tip/autotip-a rc.cfm?content_id=11890
It's old. The more humans I meet, the more I like my cats. At least they are honest.
Apart from the awful English in the post (why didn't Slashdot edit it?), Halon works by EVACUATING AIR!
(1) Take one lab mouse, evacuate air from surrounding area watch mouse die.
(2)Repeart with Halon and your family.
(3) See you on the other side
If you're seriously looking at doing this, look at more modern solutions such as FM-200.
BTW...if you can truly afford to do this housewide (and why would you?), please drop me a note with the name and number of your insurance company. Last time I built a data centre, the FM-200 system ran >$500,000. I'll admit the data centre was telco grade (and blast proof, too)...but these systems are NOT inexpensive....and if you ever activate them, refills are not cheap either.
-psy
Okay dudes, I got a buck that says his machines are all Athlons.
"Derp de derp."
Halon is perfectly breathable. As a matter of fact, I'm huffing some at this verrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrsadfffaa
"At first, we thought it was just another snake cult."
In a great many jurisdictions, Halon systems are not permitted in personal residences. They are a hazard to life and limb. The old server rooms we protected with Halon systems required 'life support' equipment in case you were in the server room when the system discharged.
Halon displaces the oxygen in the environment it is released into. This is NOT something you want to be doing in your house without sufficient research, and compliance with ALL local ordinances. Failure to do this could jeopardize you and your family. However, I'm sure your machines would survive.
Your insurance company would likely be less than thrilled at the prospect of you having an automated mechanism for discharging a gas that can asphyxiate you and yours.
Am I the only one here that suddenly got a mental picture of all the "accidents" involving Halon, Simon and the (l)users tresspassing into his server room? [grin]
Don't play with Halon, it's much too dangerous.
You've got insurance? Then let em burn, cause a computer safe fire surpression system will cost more than the computers.
But the *DATA* is important to save. I'm guessing that since you're building a house, you've got a backyard. Why not build a seperate little shack for a server or two as an off site backup?
You don't need to consider the feasibility; just consider the economics. It's far cheaper to insure the hardware and backup the data. Trying to save a computer with a halon system is spending a pound to save a penny.
Get some smoke detectors, and check the thing every month to make sure the battery works. Yup I said battery, because the AC one's are not much good if the power goes out, ups fails. I bet 9 out of 10 of you will find a faulty smoke detector. Nothing beats
I would go with the same kind of system used over a fork lift charger. It has a simple 10 pounds of extinguishment with a heat activated autodispensor. This way you can take the whole thing in for maintence, recharging. Why not use CO2 extinguighers?
If you are building make the room more fire resistant, more drywall layers, less fuel for the fire.I love it.
Halon is -
A trade name for a class of halogenated alkanes. Other trade names for these materials are Freon and Genetron. It is one of the classes of materials that has been proven to attack the ozone layer, with persistance in the atmosphere measured it decades. Manufacture of many types of Halon was banned by the Montreal protocol in 1987. Further legal restrictions were subject of the later Kyoto protocol.
The particular Halons used in fire extinguishment applications are 1301 and 1211. As of Jan 1 2003 refilling existing halon systems is banned in most of the world, and dismantling of all Halon fire extinguishing systems (including safe disposal of their contents) is required by Dec 31 2003.
Halon works by displacing the natural atmosphere in a room, reducing the concentration of oxygen to levels below that which will support combustion. Since the human body metabolizes sugars to sustain life by a controlled form of combustion, human metabolism will cease under the same conditions.
Halon, when exposed to fire or similar high temperature conditions will decompose into a variety of toxic gases that will generally cause traumas such as pulmanory edema.
It is illegal to install new Halon systems except in certain 'Critical' applications, mostly in aircraft fire supression systems.
For home applications involving electrical systems a good ABC fire extinguisher containing a dry chemical like monoammonium phosphate available at your local hardware store is the best choice. Use of fire resistant materials, elimination of clutter and especially adherance to electrical codes in your server room are also recommended to prevent fires in the first place.
Your most important fire control steps are prevention.
I was quoted $1.25 per sq ft several years ago. Even if prices have gone up to $2 sq ft, that's only 1 or 2 percent of the total cost. Pretty cheap for good protection.
Also, the very fact that you are thinking of Halon implies you want to put the fire out and preserve everything. That's a nice goal, but computers are cheap and easily replaced, and presumably you have offsite backup storage.
The point of fire protection is to give occupants time to get out and to stop the fire from spreading. Saving the structure itself is a nice side benefit. Saving minor contents is pure gravy.
Infuriate left and right
Halon systems are interesting to you for the same reason trogdor is funny. They sound cool. They are not cool. They are in fact dangerous, expensive and not very smart. As others have pointed out. 1) Halon systems are illegal. and 2) Sprinklers, fire extinguishers, monitored alarm systems will all serve the same purpose for less money.
I personally think that monitored alarm systems are what you are looking for. They can monitor for fire, and get the firemen to come if there is a problem, real fast.
-Sean
My uncle, a firefighter, has a sprinkler system. He was considering family safty not an overkill amount of PCs.
I mean, 10 systems? Come on, Are you addicted to SETI@home, or an evil Spammer?
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
I read somewhere recently that a sprinkler system that emits a very fine mist of water could be a viable solution where equipment is important. Because the mist is so fine there is very little water used, and therefore water damage is insignificant.
Actually, this is common sense. If you wanted to damp combustion by excluding oxygen, it would be cheaper (and more environmentally friendly) to use an inert gas like nitrogen or carbon dioxide.
There is no doubt that Halon does replace oxygen to some degree and therefore does present a potential danger of asphyxia. However, there is another problem with Halons. When they come into contact with a fire, they breaks down, releasing breakdown products that are extremely dangerous, even at low concentrations.
They're only useful if you're around to use them, and use them quickly. I think the rule is that if you don't catch a fire within three minutes of it starting, you should get the fuck out and call the fire department. Those suckers spread fast.
They're only got for 3 or 4 years, then you have to replace them. Come to think of it, all mine probably need replacing!
Collect underpants
Here's an idea: Put your machines in airtight fireproof enclosures full of somethign other than oxygen - Nitrogen or CO2 woudl work fine. Deal with the heat problem with heat exchangers or closed loop A/C. If you only have ten boxes, it'd definatley be cheaper than a gaseous supression system such as FM-200. Itsenclosures.com sells products suitable for this purpose.
For the rest of the house - sprinklers, buddy.
"The house my family is building just burn down 2 weeks before competition." Was that before or after completion?
Repeal the DMCA!
Search Google for Argonite and you will find such great links as this one. Transcript below for the clicking-impaired or just lazy :-)
Argonite - fighting fires nature's way
More and more companies are today ensuring that environmental considerations play a major part when selecting a fire fighting system. So much so that Argonite, which consists entirely of naturally occurring gasses, has long been the solution of first choice for many industrial and commercial building occupiers.
Not only has Argonite zero Ozone Depleting Potential (ODP), it also contributes nothing towards global warming, thanks to a complete absence of hydrofluorocarbons-HFCs. At the same it is a gaseous fire suppressant that has an enviable 50-year track record.
The environmental answer:
Argonite is a leading environmentally-friendly replacement for Halon 1301. An equal blend of nitrogen and argon, it produces no secondary combustion products and is particularly suitable for fighting fires in confined spaces. Because its molecular weight is close to that of air, it lingers longer when discharged to extinguish a fire. This reduces the need for hermetic sealing of a protected room - a process that can be very expensive and needs to be repeated every time structural changes are made.
Argonite is not prone to fogging, is non-toxic, non-corrosive, leaves no residue and is electrically non-conductive. This has led to it being successfully specified in applications where there is a need to avoid secondary damage by the fire fighting agent. Popular applications include computer and control rooms, tape and archive stores, electrical cabinets and switchgear compartments and around telecommunications equipment.
How Argonite Works
Should a fire start, Argonite is injected rapidly into the room, reducing the oxygen level from the normal 21% to between 11% and 13%. This is too low for further combustion to take place, yet high enough to allow essential safety personnel to operate.
Argonite is suited to either total flooding or local application. When more than a single room or compartment is protected, GIELLE normally recommends that a central bank of Argonite cylinders is connected via diverter valves. This frequently proves to be the most cost effective and efficient solution. As a permanent gas working under high pressure with single-phase flow characteristics, complicated pipe networks can be installed.
Install Fire-warners instead, and keep a fire extinguisher ready.
I fought the corporate America, and the corporate America bought the law.
Halon has been banned AFAIK (at least in Europe). Old installations are allowed to exist, but you can't install new ones. Use a CO2 solutions. But beware that if you have children around, this might be very bad!!!
Rather than screw around with chemicals, making the server area airtight, etc. a much better solution is to bolt all of the computers into a spring-loaded rack instead.
When fire is detected you could have some conventional CO2 fill the server cabinet for 1-2 minutes while your UPS software does a 'safe' shutdown of all equipment. Then either a large CO2 blast or strong spring or possibly an explosive charge launches the equipment rack through a hatch out into the yard -- safely away from the burning house.
Make sure to mark the area well so firefighters, family members, etc. don't stand in the way, and also make sure to not point it at the pool -- wouldn't that be ironic?
"But actually trying to use m4 as a general-purpose langage would be deeply perverse" --ESR
The primary extinguishing system in our room was Halon - we were advised breathing was theoretically possible, but get out quickly, because there may not be enough if you were stressed out and fumes from combusted plastics could be a problem. If we were in a situation where we could fight the fire (no automatic system), we were advised to use BCF (dry powder). The temperature drop from CO2 tended to cause more damage than the fire, when it first starts. Dry powder has the benefit that most quipment can be cleaned with a vacum cleaner.
Later I worked in rooms protected by CO2. This was definitely get out quickly time. In the end, what with the computer room being in the basement, there were safety concerns and the system was disconnected.
Nowadays, I have seen rack CO2 systems which have the benefit of delivering CO2 to the source of the fire quite quickly and underfloor systems for wiring based fires. Some CO2 would intrude into the room, but comparatively little.
For a regular room (or even an office), a sprinkler system works well. However when the water starts, remember it should also be able drain.
See my journal, I write things there
I have a friend who has some sprinklers in part of his house (the garage and basement), and when they trip, the home security system sets off alarms, calls the fire department, and cuts electricity to that part of the building.
Computers and water aren't terrible enemies IF the machine's powered down -- most computers can be dried out and used again. It's the short circuits that come from water hitting a live circuit board that cause problems.
Forward, retransmit, or republish anything I say here. Just don't misquote me.
Halon is deadly, with a capital D.
Backup your data, drop it in a fireproof box.
-=sig=-
C:\ rm -rf windows/ as the servers go flying out the roof.
Halon is bad for the ozone layer was the reason given for its going out of use in the US. They have found out recently that it is not as bad as they though so it is starting to come back.
Being exposed to Halon is not a big deal. The OSHA exposure standard is based on exposure to Halon in a neutral environment. Being in the room with a halide gas and a large fire is the problem.
The major health risk with Halon dump extinguishers is the by products of the quenching cycle. The way halides interfere with combustion is an ionic cycle that sucks the energy out of the combustion process. The cycle is a true cycle and depends on the halides eventually returning to their original state. During the cycle you get other unstable intermediate products that are not toxic per say. They are ionicly unstable and will rip atoms out of stable molecules to get to a stable state. The hotter the fire the more of the intermediate products produce and the longer they hang around. Additionally the cycle is not 100% closed. The combustion products from the plastics in computers plus the halide gases make some bad stuff(TM) like phosgene for example.
A small fire goes out quickly, typically >30 seconds and produce little in the way of toxic by products. A big fire goes out more slowly, 3-5 minutes. Because larger fire is hotter and takes so much more time to quench, far more of the toxic by products are produced. Breathing the larger quantities of the intermediate products created by a larger fire plus toxic gas produced by the fire can cause irreparable harm to you lungs. Getting out of the room quickly is to avoid exposure to the smoke and letting the Halon do its job.
The SOP for Halon dumps was: you pull the handle the electric primary power to the room disconnects, a horn sounds, a short time, seconds, later the Halon floods the room. The delay is to let everyone leave before the flood starts. Once the fire is out and the Halon and combustion site has a chance to cool off you only have to worry about the toxic smoke from the fire. I've seen people open the door to soon after a fire, let too much of the Halon escape and have the fire rekindle.
The server, the server, the server's on fire.
We don't need the data, let the mother f@#$er burn!
No, they're all Athalons
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I fail to understand why you need to use something like Halon. Seriously. And what the hell do you need 10 computers in a home server room? Why don't you try consolidating some systems and conserve some power. 10 servers at home is overkill.
Anyway, you're obviously not going to do that so let me give you some other suggestions. Building the server room in a fireproof/fire retardant enclosure. Next, place a sprinkler/foam system in the server room. They manufacture systems that can be used in single rooms or throughout the house. This is all the protection you need and the foam/sprinkler system would not damage the systems too much, if at all.
Set up a shack (maybe even a ship container) in your backyard where you install the servers. That will not only separate you from danger of fire, but keep the noise and heat out of your home, too.
The solitary PC you use as terminal can^H^H^Hshould be switched off during the night or absence. So no problem here.
If the servers burn you only have to kill the power line leading to the shack/container - just let them burn (if they still do after power cut) and have the fire brigate quench the remains. As someone said before: it's cheaper to replace a few servers than to install a fire extinguishing system - at last if you have current backups and moderately common hardware.
No. That is just not true. Period. You're making this up. A commercial/residential full-room fire suppression system that operated by "lowering the oxygen to where it's unbreathable" would be illegal in every state, county and city in the country. Use your common sense. If you can't use your common sense, use Google! :-)
You may find a search there for "halon toxicity" to be illuminating.
Full-room Halon suppression systems work at concentrations from 5-15%. At these concentrations, at sea level, you've got far more available O2 than at 7000' cabin pressure in a commercial airliner. Or walking down the sidewalk in downtown Denver, for that matter.
There are four or five different non-CFC alternatives to Halon 1301 on the market, but suppression system manufacturers still continue to look very hard for alternatives exactly because nobody has found one as effective and safe as 1301.
I recall seeing a demo of how a typical house fire starts. They buried an ordinary book of matches in an ordinary couch, and set the matches off electrically. (Very few fires start anything like that, of course, but the magnitude of the first ignition is typical.) It took maybe 3 or 4 minutes for exponential growth of the fire to involve the whole room.
The argument that was being made was for smoke detectors. The idea being that you need to get out while the only sign of the fire is some invisible ozone and/or particulate. By the time you actually smell smoke, there's a good chance your evacuation route is already blocked.
But I think I see an argument for sprinklers as well. I imagine the above demo would have to involve the whole couch before the fire would be hot enough to set off a sprinkler. But then it would probably set off 2 or 3! You know more about supressing fires than I do, but isn't 100 gallons in a couple of minutes enough to put out a burning couch?
I work for a company that puts in fire protection systems, so maybe I can provide some insight here.
First of all, Halon is not installed anymore. It isn't poisonous or toxic as some here have claimed. Halon is very damaging to the ozone layer, so it is being phased out. A popular alternative for protecting computer equipment is FM-200. I have very little experience with Halon / FM-200 as my company mostly does water-based systems. I think that anything other than a water-based system in a home would not be practical, but I may be wrong or biased.
Most of our work is in commercial buildings, but we do occasionally install sprinklers in houses. Usually this is because the owner requests it, or because the house is large enough to require it under local fire codes. Sometimes houses are built too close together and the fire code requires the houses to be protected. I have sprinklers in my home, but mainly because I work for a fire protection company.
If you are building a new house, adding sprinklers is fairly cheap. I'd say roughly $1-2 per square foot. You may get a discount on your home owner's insurance (in our state, it is a 10% discount I believe). Retrofitting a house to have sprinklers is possible but difficult (and expensive).
Sprinkler contractors are, at least in Texas, licensed by the state. Most areas require you to file detailed plans with the fire marshal's office and have the system inspected once or twice during construction. It would be possible to install fire sprinklers yourself if you could work within your local laws. This would be about the same difficulty as running your own electrical or plumbing, so it's not for the faint of heart.
A common myth, especially in movies, is that sprinklers are centrally controlled (by computer?!) and that if one sprinkler goes off in an area, all of them do. This is not true. Sprinklers are heat activated, and only those close enough to a strong heat source will go off. Some sprinklers have a piece of metal that melts or dislodges to allow water to flow. Others have a glass tube filled with a liquid and a small bubble. When it gets hot, the bubble expands and bursts the glass tube. Once activated, they can only be stopped by turning off the water supply to them.
If a sprinkler goes off in your home, you can expect severe water damage in that area. Your computers might survive, but I wouldn't count on it. Would your computer survive if you turned it on and threw it in the shower for 20 minutes? Make backups, and have offsite copies if possible.
I worked in the machine room for a large oil company from the mid-eighties to the mid-nineties where we had a halon system installed. I was thoroughly trained in how to shut it off if it was ever activated. There were two large red buttons about three feet apart that had to be pressed simultaneously to disable the dispersion of halon. I was warned to evacuate the room immediately if I could not disable the system and was told that I would suffocate within two minutes upon activation. I was also informed that the cost of recharging the halon system was approximately $25,000. Since I have retired, there have been safer and more environmentally friendly methods available for machine room fire control i.e. sprinklers, argon, etc. Personally, I would have an alarm system connected to the local fire department along with hand-held fire extinguishers available. You must calculate the risk with the cost of protection.
Ugh. Once again:
HALON DOES NOT WORK BY DISPLACING OXYGEN
It was banned because it's bad for the ozone layer, not because it's bad for humans.
Read this post, this post, and this post to get the low-down on what Halon really does.
Sure your residential sprinkler sounds good on paper. However they require quite a bit of water. In a city it is (in theory) no big deal to put a bigger pipe into all houses just to supply the sprinklers. However I have my own well, to provide for a sprinkler means I have to have a bigger pump, which costs significantly more money. The power for that pump comes from the main panel (through other boxes latter) in my utility room, right next to the most likely places a fire would start (dryer, furnance, water heater), once the sprinkler goes off the panel shorts out and before the first is out I've lost power to the well (breaker blows), not to mention water in the main box, before the main breaker.
Now look at the cost of a fire. Even a small one confined to the utility room will mean your house is unlivable for weeks or months. (smoke damage means at minimum you replace the carpet and paint everything likely more). If a residential house starts on fire you are best off, and it could be cheaper for the insurance company, if you grab the pictures (heirlooms) and then burn it to the ground, protecting the neighbors. A house is a house, people can live anywhere. Better to get out of a burning house, and then move elsewhere.
At my school, they've even got Halon in one of the public computer labs. Of course, you have to have a research account or a EE account to actually use the Ultrasparc II workstations, but any idiot could walk in and pull the alarm. Given some of the stuff in there, I'd say they had the system in place a long, long time ago. While it might make sense in the university's main server room, where you can break a million dollars worth of equipment with a cherry bomb, now that even high-end workstations are pretty cheap, I doubt they'll ever install any new fire suppression systems in the labs.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
He says he lives off a well, but he doesn't have a cistern. Hmmm.
So, every time you turn the tap, the well pump goes on? Well, that's a mighty unusual setup you have there.
brown nosing prick
you'd be better off using CO2, which also displaces O2, since the combustions products of halon include nerve gases.
Halon? No way! Your data, and to a lesser extent, all the config files (because time is valuable) is where all the value is. Are you concerned about a) the server room catching fire and burning the house down, or b) the house burning down and killing your server room? Simply make sure your server "room" is built with as little combustible material as possible. Concrete block walls, concrete floor, steel shelving. Don't stack your hardware. Run all the wires in steel conduit. Install sprinklers. Done. Make sure you can login to your servers (telnet, Timbuktu, Exceed, etc) from a secondary place, via both wireline LAN and 802.11. Keep backups off-site. I mirror my stuff remotely at a friend's place, and vice-versa. You only have 10 boxes, really not all that much. If you are REALLY concerned about losing stuff, rent a rack of machines at your local ISP. They'll provide all the security you need, with zero risk of fire.
required in *all* new scottsdale, AZ homes, has been that way for a while
s da le15.htm
http://www.homefiresprinkler.org/releases/Scott
Hayon sensors used in the Bradley Fighting Vehicle are very susceptible to camera flashes -- in fact, when I was out at NTC a month ago, a poor guy actually set off the Hayon system by said flash. The model used in the BFV is similar to the civilian model -- and part of the Hayon detection system is watching for a 'flash' of bright light. My recommendation is if you decide to get a halon system, get one that can be set off manually, and use it in conjunction with a smoke alarm when you are in the house.
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
>>ozone depleting Halon
That's just knee-jerk enviromental scaremongering. What has a greater enviromental impact:
1) a Halon discharge which prevents a fire, or
2) a house burning to the ground?
Yep, that's what I thought. If you doubt #2 is the correct answer might I suggest that sometime, just for fun, you ask an environmental engineer about the remarkable volume of nasty chemicals, soot and particulates released as a result of burning carpets, padding, insulation, paint and misc. plastics which make up a modern home? That should remove any doubts.
But let's assume for one moment (contrary to scientific evidence) that Halon truly is damaging to the environment. What do you rekon happens to the refrigerant in the air conditioning system when a home burns down? Yes, that's right, it's vented straight into the atmosphere. Well, if you accept the enviro-nazi poposition that Halon is damaging then surely one must also accept the idea that air conditioning refrigerant also damages the ozone layer. So what's worse? A Halon discharge or a big nasty housefire AND a refrigerant gas discharge?
Finally, consider that in many states pressure-treated wood is considered toxic for purposes of disposal, requires special handling, and cannot be placed in a landfill. Burning it simply releases those toxins into the air. SO when that deck goes up in flames, it releases mercury, arsenic, and a host of other nasties.
The real risk of a Halon system not environmental -- the risk is *suffocation* due to an accidental discharge. Halon, being an invisible, odorless gas, will choke the life out of the homeowner nearly as well as it chokes out a fire. It's a system which requires regular professional inspection, testing and maintenance.
Halon/FM-200 work great when the gas can get to the fire source. If the fire starts inside the wall, they may not be able to help. Most commercial and military uses of FM-200 are in spaces with solid walls. If the trigger is smoke, there may not be a way for the FM-200 to get inside the walls, unless you put discharge heads inside the walls.
Sprinklers won't go off for a fire that starts inside the walls until it breaches the wall and heats up a protected space suffictly to set off a sprinkler head. This may or may not be near the original source of the fire. But the sprinkler will keep the wall cooler and reduce spread of the fire. But it may not put it out - a fire company response is still needed.