Dear All, Greetings! Ours is a Power & Water production plant. The most of our buildings are protected with an automatic FM 200- fire extinguishing agent except our internet server room. So now we are planning to provide some automatic fire protection system for server room, we received some quotes from vendor for FM200 for this room, and received the quotes in halfer million budget project. The fire monitoring system is already installed in here As above mentioned, please advice me if NFPA makes it must to use FM200 only and if so why a CO2 system cannot be considered. The current proposals to the server room includes full integration with plant fire monitoring alarms, annunciation etc. My question would be, can the server room be a standalone system with just a pre/post release hooter? Will it still meet the code requirements. (basically its unmanned room but located in our main admin building). Please advice.. thanks in advance.

Vinod NFPA 75 does not specify or advocate the use of any single agent. You can use CO2 but I would advise against it due to associated toxicity issues. There have been 51 fire incidents in the US over the last 35 years, during these incidents the discharge of CO2 had resulted in 72 deaths and 145 injuries. The HSE advise a dangerous toxic load value of 1.5 x 10^40 ppm^n. min. Common choices are: Inergen (expensive) FM200, FE 25 , or NOVEC 1230. As an alternative to these clean agents, depending on room design, you could look at Hypoxic fire suppression.

Why not a hypoxic air system? No toxic discharge, no water damage, no cylinders MH issues, doesn't need a fire (therefore damage) to trigger it, and the best bit, you know if it's not working at the time it becomes defective, rather than finding out is broken when you need it for real.