Is there anything stopping me from an engineering standpoint installing a water tower on my property and making sprinklers around a radius of my home to drench the area in case of wildfire?
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You can plan for wildfires and there are various vegetation that will take awhile to get hot enough to burn. Problem with some wildfire prone areas is the state doesn’t actually manage the risk in forests, removing of old dead trees which burn at lower temperatures than living healthy trees. Add that to the past century of 100% suppression which had left tons of fuel laying around that would have been burnt away in previous seasons has added to the problem and changes to what trees actually makeup to the forest, there is actually several year gap were sequoia didn’t give off seeds since they use the heat from the fires clearing the ground for the seedlings to be able to grow.
Seems like your best bet would be a decent width ‘moat’ of rock and stone around your property, concrete house with stone fascia, and maybe a wet-down system to keep sparks from catching on the roof.
It is both effective and more reliable to just make the house out of concrete, including the roof, with rolling shutters on the doors and windows and closing vents. With smart house features you don’t even need to be there to lock it down.
sprinklers in any building, home or office, are for life safety. to give you more time to get out safely. they are NOT to save the building.
you can’t possibly dump enough water on a wildfire to protect the structure. homes can ignite purely from the radiant heat of the fire.
embers can get into soffit vents, open windows, under decks, etc.
more and more wood areas are requiring “firewise” standards.
Sprinkler systems do exist and are used sometimes in wildfire prone areas. The thing is, if the actual wildfire front reaches your property, sprinklers wont cut it.
* The radiant heat is incredibly powerful and will melt/burn things, even with sprinklers
* You need a lot of water and be able to run pressure pumps for a long time to cover the danger period
* Power lines will most likely be affected so you wont have electric pumps
* Oxygen will get used up so petrol generators tend to die
Generally, the the sprinkler systems are only useful against the embers that travel ahead of the fire front. A big part of how they work is by keeping your gutters wet, because dry gutters full of dry leaves are a common spot for fires to start.
I live in a wildfire prone area and have some basic roof sprinklers. Once again, it’s just to keep the gutters wet against embers, not to stop the main fire. I’ll have evacuated well before that happens.
A wildfire is not like a house fire or any other common fire you might think of. It moves slow and burns vast areas and amounts of flammable material, which makes it very hot. This means that simply soaking cannot help much because the water will dry out and evaporate pretty much immediately, as will any water you sprinkle after the flaming front has arrived at your house.
Your best bet to protect your house from a wildfire is to make sure the perimeter of the house is not flammable, and also that the house itself is not flammable. Reinforced concrete construction, no wooden elements like shutters or a wooden roof also help, and a concrete, stone, or just dirt perimeter around the house, so that no burning trees or leaves or pinecones can get to the house, is enough.
I live in Greece which is ravaged by wildfires every year, and I know people whose houses have been burned and people whose houses were right in the thick of it but came out of it with only minor exterior damage.
better than a sprinkler system, the exterior should be made of fire resistant materials. Brick, stucco, Hardy siding, aluminum trim. Stone mulch, no vegetation near the house, stone patio, etc. If you want a sprinkler, plan a pool as a water source and consider a power backup system.
I have seen on tv a system that pumps water from the pool and sprays across the roof and into the rain gutters to be collected and repumped, and down the walls of the home into troughs to be collected and repumped. The pumps were powered by electric with backup by a diesel generator with a protected fuel tank.
This wasn’t just a sprinkle of water, it was a literal wall of water covering all exterior surfaces of the home. The purpose is to prevent wind blown cinders from igniting the house.
It looked like it could work. I never saw any follow up.
The best defense for homes in these areas is to plan ahead – make a fire break and don’t plant trees/vegetaion around your home, keep the grass short, build with fire resistant materials (cement block, metal roof), etc.
It IS pretty common in Australia to have a large diameter water meter installed alongside the service meter for a mini homeowner fire service. It’s a hose system that falls somewhere between a garden hose and a full fire hose. A combination of all these + training/awareness has had high success rates.
Actually they are mandated in certain areas here in australia
unlike the sprinkler systems you see in movies these are externally mounted , usually on the roof of the properties
the winds in these fires can spontainiously combust materials and this is to lessen the chance of that happening by reducing the amount of heat contained.
as others have pointed out they will do only so much. If the house is in the direct path of an intense wildfire, then it is unfortunately already gone in most cases with or without sprinklers
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