The following is an excerpt from the October 7, 2014, Security Systems News coverage of the 2014 Benchmark Report’s official release…
SUWANEE, Ga.— BuildingReports, an inspection reporting services company, recently released its first benchmark report based on inspection data from more than 120 million fire and life safety devices. And the company plans to follow up with additional reports that provide a more detailed look at the data.
“The inaugural report is a 30,000-foot view of the inspection data and provides a solid foundation, but it’s a foundation we’ll build upon in quarterly addendums and annual reports moving forward,” Jason Kronz, president and CTO of BuildingReports, which is based here, told Security Systems News.
He said that among findings in the 2014 BuildingReports Fire & Life Safety Inspection Benchmark Report was a confirmation of “the conventional wisdom of the industry, in that addressable systems appear to be much more reliable than non-addressable systems.
The industry has believed that for many years, Kronz said, “but there really wasn’t enough data to back it up.”
The addressable systems’ failure rate was 2.33 percent compared to 3.05 percent for non-addressable systems, a 25 percent difference. The addressable and conventional device sample was 46 million devices connected to one or the other of those two types of systems.
One surprise finding of the report was that “for sprinkler systems, especially for NFPA 25 and 13 systems, we saw just a little over 5 percent of devices were failed because of improper signage,” Kronz said.
