Prefer to Upsize Pump for Improved Pipe Sizes?

In general, when designing fire sprinkler systems with a fire pump, is your philosophy to only provide the minimum fire pump size that is needed to support your system, or do you often increase the fire pump size to decrease pipe sizes on the system?

How much are you typically willing to increase a fire pump size in order to benefit the pipe sizes throughout your project?

When I first learned about how to size a fire pump, I was told that if your system gets over 100 psi then you might as well size the pump to get as close to 170-175 psi on the system as possible - the reason being that the cost to upsize a fire pump is less than the savings associated with smaller mains and branch pipe.

I'm not sure that there's a hard-and-fast rule of thumb, but I'm just interested if other people use the same strategy or if it's entirely dependent on the type of job and size of the job.

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