Does Automist extinguish a fire or suppress it?

Automist is classified as a fire suppression system, but in many real fires suppression results in the fire being completely extinguished.

This is fundamental to residential fire protection. NFPA 13D is designed around controlling residential fires, preventing flashover in the room of origin and improving the opportunity for occupants to escape.

Automist is designed and tested against the same core life-safety objectives: to control a residential fire, prevent it developing to flashover and improve the opportunity for occupants to escape. It does not have to guarantee complete extinguishment of every possible fire to achieve that objective.

In a real home, however, most fires begin as finite, localised events. If they are found and attacked early enough, there is often an opportunity to do more than control them: put them out.

Why can early intervention make such a difference?

Fire grows with time.

A small fire on a cooker, an appliance or a piece of furniture can be much easier to extinguish in its early stages than after it has spread to surrounding materials.

Automist uses smoke detection to initiate scanning of the room. Its wall-mounted spray heads then use thermal sensing to locate the fire and direct high-pressure water mist towards it.

Because the system does not need to wait for a ceiling-mounted thermal element to reach its activation temperature before it begins looking for the fire, it can intervene while the fire is still relatively small.

That early, targeted response is one reason Automist can often extinguish the kinds of fires that occur in homes rather than simply holding them until the fire service arrives.

What does that look like in a real fire?

We have documented six real Automist activations in occupied homes.

They include cooking fires, a candle fire, a faulty electrical appliance, a deliberately started fire and a slow-developing fire.

In every case, Automist found the fire and prevented it from spreading beyond the area where it started. In several, the outcome went further than containment.

A candle fire in Belfast was stopped in 29 seconds, using around two gallons of water, before the flames could reach the furniture and decorations around it.

In York, a faulty air fryer caught fire beside the cooker. Automist located and attacked the source, and according to the resident, the fire was already out before the building’s main fire alarm sounded.

In Greater Manchester, an occupant left a pan of oil heating and went to sleep. Automist acted while nobody was awake to intervene and suppressed the pan fire within 21 seconds, before it could spread through the kitchen.

These are not laboratory demonstrations. They are examples of what early suppression can mean in practice.

So why call Automist a suppression system rather than an extinguishing system?

Because suppression describes the performance Automist is required to deliver; extinguishment can be the outcome.

No residential suppression system should depend on a promise that every conceivable fire will always be completely extinguished.

The required job is to stop the fire escalating into a life-threatening event.

But when Automist detects and attacks a finite domestic fire early, real-world experience shows that the result can be better than simply holding the fire in check: the fire can be put out before it has the opportunity to become a major fire.

What happens in real fires?

Our The Fire Stopped Here case study documents six actual Automist activations, including the circumstances of each fire, how quickly the system responded and what remained afterwards.

Download: The Fire Stopped Here — Six Real Automist Activation Stories