Fire Sprinklers and other Fire Alarm Matters

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I know this sounds trivial but I wish they would start showing fire sprinklers in TV and movies (including animated) more realistically!

Every time I see fire sprinklers going off in a show, animated or not, every single fire sprinkler in the building goes off. And sometimes they show fire sprinklers activated by smoke or at the pull of a fire alarm.

But in reality that's not how fire sprinklers work, unless it's a "deluge system" type sprinkler system. I recently did some research on fire sprinklers and for one thing smoke doesn't activate fire sprinklers, the temperature immediately around the sprinkler has to be 155 to 165 degrees Fahrenheit before it can be triggered. And when the temperature is hot enough, a glass bulb on the sprinkler breaks and that's when the waterworks start! Another thing, fire sprinklers, at least these days, go off one at a time instead of all at once, which would be unnecessary and cause water damage. Maybe in the old days multiple fire sprinklers did go off at once, and I think it happened at a college campus I went to, only it was just in the cafeteria, not the entire building, and the fire alarm did go off (and I could have easily been caught in that because I was going to have lunch there but then changed my mind!) But now fire sprinklers only go off one at a time and when the area immediately around it is heated.

Unless they already do this, I wish they would start showing fire sprinklers going off more realistically, showing them going off one at a time and not activated by smoke but rather by flames or by high heat and not activating at the pull of a fire alarm, although not all fire alarm situations in shows or movies include sprinklers going off, even when there's a fire (they didn't show it in the Arthur episode "April 9th," there was a fire but no sprinklers were featured.)

Some shows and movies, including animated, that did feature fire sprinklers going off were "21 Jump Street" (1980s TV series) "Fuller House," "Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life," "Mixed Nutz," "The Mighty B," (that Nickelodeon cartoon with Bessie Higginbottom,) etc. They showed the sprinklers activated just by smoke or by the pull of a fire alarm, but they all showed every single sprinkler going off at once. In "Middle School: The Worst Years of My Life," the main character, Rafe Khatchadorian, lights a lighter at a sprinkler in the principal's office and causes all the sprinklers to go off. The fire alarms are also activated and the strobe lights are activated too, something you don't see in every fire alarm situation in TV and movies, not even in live action although actual fire alarms are present but a different sound is used.

I also wonder how they don't use flashing fire alarm lights in TV and movie fire alarm situations, yet they use sprinklers. Live action is one thing but isn't it tedious to do in animation, animating the sprinklers, especially in 2D animation? And it would be nice if more animated shows did fire alarms with flashing lights. Maybe not strobe lights and maybe not white lights, but like they did in the Cartoon Network show "Clarence," they could show a slow-flashing red light (red lights might be easier to show and animate than white lights and they're less hard on the eyes than strobe lights, which could cause seizures.) They did show flashing lights in some other animated fire alarm situations like Grossology and an episode of Transformers Rescuebots. It was also shown in an animated movie but I cannot remember which one, it's been years since I seen it and was on Netflix once. I would appreciate it if more animated shows added flashing lights to fire alarm situations even if they're not strobe lights and even if the lights are red or another color besides white (I like red best anyway and a school I went to had red strobe lights.) Would also appreciate it if they started showing fire sprinklers more realistically as showing sprinklers all going off at once and activated by smoke is quite deceptive!

But why do shows and movies always show the sprinklers all going off at the same time and activated by smoke or the pull of a fire alarm? I don't get it!

Sources of How Fire Sprinklers Really Work:
https://blog.koorsen.com/will-smoke-set ... ler-system
https://www.allegiantfire.net/news/top- ... prinklers/
https://www.qrfs.com/blog/228-shatterin ... prinklers/

May add more links.

because most of us have only seen fire alarms go off in movies, where they go off in an unrealistic, dramatic way. people are often not doing a lot of research, or when they do, realize that things are either not spectacular enough in reality, or hard to recreate, so they go for something spectacular but cost effective.


I animated a sequence for a documentary a while back, about the fukushima tsunami.
it took me forever, because the tsunami moved incredibly slowly but took so many individual pieces of debris with it. - so the only thing making it spectacular was the scale, but the individual bits were just floating around, very undramatically.

the director then showed me a video of explosions of what she thought was the nuclear power plant and asked me to use that as reference, because it looked impressive. She was disappointed when I told her it was an oil refinery, and the powerplant only had steam explosions - devastating, but without any fireballs.
i insisted on drawing things correctly and I do think it was better, since it was a documentary. But usually, people just go by what they think things look like - figuratively speaking: they go with the oil refinery explosion, and assume the audience also can't tell the difference.

the lesson is that there is little to learn about reality from most animation.
I'm trying to do my best, though.