Room Integrity Test

Water-based suppression systems provide only a minimum amount of fire protection. For critical company information systems, data centers, paper archives, museums and other enclosures whose contents are susceptible to water damage, sprinkler systems will indeed protect the building from fire damage, but at the expense of the contents being protected! It was due to this necessity to provide sufficient fire protection for the building and also to mitigate or eliminate damage to the contents that non-water-based suppression systems were introduced. Inert Gases were one of these fire suppressants. Inert Gases presented a new problem to the designer however; to extinguish a fire and to keep it suppressed, the gas needed to be present in the enclosure for many minutes.