Components of a Standpipe System?

MeyerFire University | FX001.07

By Joe Meyer, PE

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TRANSCRIPT

What are the components of a standpipe system? 

Today we're going to talk about the main components that are consistent across most standpipe systems. 

Let's first talk about a water supply.  

Not all standpipe systems are even connected to a water supply.  

For instance a manual dry standpipe in an open parking garage might only connect a fire department connection to the pipe network. 

A manual wet system might be filled with water from an underground supply, but the flow and pressure come from a fire truck supplying the water through the fire department connection.  

A high rise with automatic wet standpipes have flow and pressure that is provided automatically through a fire pump and a water source albeit a city connection or a water storage tank. 

The one thing that is common across all standpipe systems, from a supply side, is the Fire Department Connection, or FDC. 

Here we have a Storz connection, but this could also be a series of 2-1/2” threaded connections. 

The fire department connection allows the fire department to either supply the primary pressure and flow, to the standpipe system, or it can provide supplementary pressure and flow.  

The number of inlets and the location of the FDC are especially critical for standpipes because many of the systems rely heavily on flow and pressure by the fire department connection. Or, from the fire department, but through the Fire Department Connection.  

For instance, NFPA 14 which is the standard for the installation of standpipe and hose systems, has more stringent requirements for the number of inlets, location, and even the quantities of the fire department connection then just a sprinkler system does.  

One example is that NFPA 14 requires a Fire Department Connection to be located within 100 feet of a fire hydrant, unless permitted otherwise the Authority Having Jurisdiction.  

The goal here is to reduce the amount of hose and time needed to connect for the fire department to the standpipe system. 

Beyond the fire department connection is a check valve which is included when there are multiple fire department connections or there’s a connection to another water supply.  

The check valve make sure that flow does not flow out the fire department connection.

Pipe and fittings, which usually run horizontally and vertically through a building to transport the water to the hose connections, that’s next after the check valve. 

Standpipes also have control valves.

One requirement in NFPA 14 is to add a control valve that would allow a vertical standpipe to be isolated from the system.  

This could be helpful for responding firefighters, but it could also be helpful for repair or maintenance work. Instead of shutting down an entire building and drain that system, you could work on only a portion of that system. 

When we get to highrises or superhighrises, this becomes really important because we want some kind of redundancy or a live standpipe at all times. 

We don’t want to sacrifice the whole building just because we have to do some maintenance or repair work. 

Pressure gauges are used at the top of each standpipe and on both sides of a pressure regulating device.

Firefighters or maintenance workers can use them to determine the pressure on the system and look for abnormal readings 

Lastly we have the hose connections themselves, which is the point where a firefighter would hook up a hose to the standpipe system.

The hose connections each have an individual valve, which allows a firefighter to control the amount of water going into their hose.  

With high pressure systems, these hose valves can also have a pressure reducing component so that the pressure that goes into the hose is not so high that it becomes unmanageable for a firefighter. 

A hose connection may be a threaded 2-1/2 inch valve or it could be a valve with a connected hose.  

Those with hoses have become more and more obsolete as the goal has really shifted from fighting a fire from the building occupants to just trying to get all occupants out of the building and leaving the firefighting to the professionals.  

Hose valves can be placed inside a cabinet or they could just be directly attached to pipe and exposed in the stairwell. 

The piece that’s brought by the fire department is the hose, well the hoses themselves.  

These connect to the hose connections with nozzles on the end so that the firefights use to manually fight a fire. 

If the standpipe system is automatic, it would also likely have a pump to get the pressure needed at each hose connection automatically.

We’ll go into more detail on each of these components in future videos, but those are the main components for a typical standpipe system.

I'm Joe Meyer, this is MeyerFire University.