Protecting Your Home from Wildfire: What We've Learned from Professional Installations (Part 1)
- Shawn Gardner
- Nov 19
- 11 min read
Through our professional installations of wildfire defense systems protecting luxury estates across California's high-risk zones, we've learned what actually works when the ember storm arrives. As we scale up to bring this life-saving technology to more homeowners throughout the Bay Area and beyond, this is the first in a series where I'll share the critical knowledge we've gained, not just for luxury homeowners, but for everyone living in the wildland-urban interface.
Understanding the Real Threat
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Here's what most people get wrong about wildfire defense: it's not the wall of flames that destroys most homes. It's the ember storm that arrives 30 to 60 minutes before the fire front. These wind-driven embers can travel miles ahead of the main fire, landing in gutters, under decks, in wood piles, and igniting dozens of small fires around your property. Once these spot fires take hold, your home becomes vulnerable from multiple directions.
The second major threat is radiant heat. Research shows that radiant heat from a wildfire can be felt up to 500 feet (150 meters) from the fire front. When a fire storm passes near your property, this intense radiant heat can blow out dual-pane windows and ignite furniture inside your home, even without flames ever touching your structure. This is why protecting the sides of your house, particularly through eave sprinklers in the soffit, becomes critically important.
Professional System Design: What Actually Works
Through our installations on homes valued from $3 million to $20 million throughout the Bay Area's wildland-urban interface, we've refined our approach based on real-world performance. Here's what we've learned:
Piping and Materials
The backbone of any reliable system is copper piping. While plastic can work for certain applications, copper provides the durability and heat resistance necessary when temperatures spike during a fire event.
For the sprinkler heads, we use stainless steel rotor heads on the roof and property perimeter because their spray pattern coverage maximizes protection with minimum gallons per minute. On the eaves, we use landscape shrub head side strip nozzles and center strip nozzles to provide targeted wall and soffit protection. Finding these heads in brass or copper is difficult. Until the irrigation industry fully embraces wildfire protection standards, you may need to use plastic heads, but the system design and proper installation still provide reliable defense.
One common misconception we encounter: many people assume impact sprinklers are ideal because of their throw distance. In practice, impact sprinklers put down too much water, often overwhelming the capacity of an average 1,500 square-foot home's water supply. For most residential applications, your total system volume should stay under 40 gallons per minute. Rotor spray heads give you better control over water distribution without the excessive flow rates.
The Critical Question: Water Supply
Everything you do when building a wildfire defense system must answer one fundamental question: what happens when the power goes out and municipal water shuts down?
In recent major fires, municipal water systems have failed precisely when homeowners needed them most. This is why your planning must assume you're operating independently. If you're in the mountains with a propane generator, that's a good start. If you have water storage and a well, even better. The key is running your calculations to ensure 6 to 8 hours of continuous protection.
Here's the math you need to work through: calculate your system's gallons per minute, convert that to gallons per hour, then determine if your water source can sustain that flow rate for the duration you need. Increase your well's GPM capacity if possible. Size your water storage accordingly. The difference between 4 hours of coverage and 8 hours could be the difference between a standing structure and a total loss.
Coverage Strategy: Creating a Moisture Barrier
Unlike traditional irrigation where you want head-to-head spacing for complete coverage, wildfire defense operates on a different principle. Your goal isn't saturating every square inch of your property. It's creating a continuous moisture barrier around your home. The sprinklers only need to wet the side of the house and about 5 feet around the perimeter.
This moisture barrier serves two purposes: it prevents ember ignition on surfaces around your home, and it protects against radiant heat damage to the structure itself. When you maintain wet surfaces on your walls, eaves, and the immediate perimeter, embers can't ignite near your home to start those devastating spot fires.
If you protect your home from the ember storm, you're simultaneously protecting it from radiant heat should the fire front pass through your area. No small fires around the perimeter means no pathway for fire to reach your structure.
Valves and Protection
You can run plastic valves to keep costs manageable, but they need protection from heat. Underground in a concrete box works well. Run the copper pipes up beside the house from there. Metal brass valves are superior but expensive and often hard to source.
If you're mounting plastic valves on the side of your house, here's a simple solution: cover them with an electrical box. Mount the box to the wall, cut out the back, and the front panel provides heat shielding for your valve assembly.
The Sensor Challenge
Here's one of the biggest barriers facing the entire DIY wildfire defense market: sensors and controllers.
FireRoofs has developed proprietary sensors and controllers based on multiple threat detection methods: smoke detection, temperature sensing, real flame detection around the property, and wildfire satellite mapping technology integrated into our platform. As a fire is detected within proximity of a home, our system assigns threat levels. The closer the fire gets, the higher the threat level, and the more water the system deploys.
For example, when a fire is 3 to 5 miles away, we might run perimeter property sprinklers in cycles of 10 to 15 minutes with 30-minute intervals between runs. This keeps hillsides damp and reduces fuel ignitability. As the fire advances closer, we activate roof and eave sprinklers. The entire controller and sensor network adjusts water deployment based on real-time threat assessment.
The next level of defense in our professional systems is Class A foam injection directly into the sprinkler system. This increases water effectiveness, allowing less water to provide protection for longer periods as threat levels remain high. Learn more about how Class A foam enhances wildfire defense.
The Reality of Professional Installation Costs
Professional wildfire defense systems are expensive. Most of our current installations are on luxury homes in the wildland-urban interface, with property values of $3 million and above. This price point isn't arbitrary. California's FAIR Plan caps coverage at $3 million. If your home is valued above that threshold in the San Francisco Bay Area or other high fire danger zones, insurance only pays out $3 million maximum.
To give you a realistic sense of investment, a typical 4,000 square-foot single-story ranch home with comprehensive wildfire defense runs approximately $80,000 for a complete system installation. This includes our IoT controller with satellite connectivity (via Starlink), Class A foam injection system, early detection wildfire sensors, and satellite wildfire mapping technology all integrated into a smart controller that monitors threats 24/7. Adding a pool connection for backup water supply can increase the total by roughly $10,000. Every installation is custom-built to your property's specific layout, topography, and fire risk profile. The only exception is when we're working with developers on new construction, where we can achieve some economies of scale by integrating systems during the building phase rather than retrofitting existing homes.
In today's market, with contractor costs, permit fees, building material prices, and the sheer hassle of rebuilding, homeowners with properties valued over $3 million are increasingly taking protection into their own hands. They're installing systems that will defend their homes during a fire event rather than taking the risk of filing a claim after a major fire storm.
What's particularly frustrating from an industry perspective is how building codes have evolved. Regulators have mandated interior sprinkler systems for new construction, yet interior sprinklers didn't protect a single home in recent major wildfires that originated from wildland fires. The threat is exterior. The ember storm arrives from outside. The radiant heat comes from outside. Interior sprinklers address house fires, not wildfire defense.
Whether the increasing threat comes from more development in the wildland-urban interface or from climate change is, frankly, irrelevant to the homeowner facing evacuation orders. The fact is this: homes are burning down at an accelerating rate, and we need to prevent fire damage before the fire storm arrives. So help us help save more homes by sharing this article.
DIY Protection: Getting Started
This brings us to the practical question: how do you defend your home if you're installing a system yourself?
Picture this scenario: you have a home in the mountains. The fire is approaching. You're ordered to evacuate. What protection have you put in place?
If You Have a Pool
If you have a swimming pool, you're starting with a significant advantage. Get a diesel generator pump with at least a 1-inch discharge pipe. Set up quick connectors that attach to valves on your house. Before evacuation, you start that diesel pump, connect it to your system, and open your valves. With a couple of rotor sprinklers on the roof and a few sprinklers wetting the sides of the house and immediate landscaping, you've created that critical moisture barrier.
For eave and side-of-house coverage, irrigation shrub nozzles work excellently for this application. Look for center strip and side strip shrub nozzles at your local irrigation store. You can run half-inch or three-quarter-inch copper line on the eaves of your house, tie in a T-fitting with the center strip nozzle, and create effective coverage along your roofline and walls.
Any local irrigation supply store can help you source brass fittings, copper pipe, and these shrub nozzles. The components aren't exotic. They're standard irrigation parts applied to wildfire defense.
If You're on a Well with Decent Pressure
Another approach for homes with well water and adequate pressure: tie into your exterior hose bib, run three-quarter to 1-inch pipe up the side of the house to the roof, and from the center of the roof, install rotor sprinklers with a throw of 35 feet or more.
Again, impact sprinklers work but put down too much water. All that excess water runs off the roof, hits the ground, and goes straight into the water table. The majority is wasted. You need this system to run for 6 to 8 hours. That's the optimal protection window.
Our professionally designed systems aim for a 12-hour window by using Class A foam injection, linking to swimming pool water sources, and carefully cycling sprinkler stations. When I say cycling, I mean having different stations activate at different times. A good example: run the roof sprinklers for 10 minutes, then switch to perimeter sprinklers for 10 minutes, then back to roof, then perimeter. This cycling approach maintains a constant moisture and humidity barrier around the home, which prevents embers from igniting spot fires.
Basic DIY Setup Priority
If you're setting up a basic system yourself, here's the priority sequence I recommend:
First priority: Run one ball valve and one pipe up the side of the house. Protect the roof and surrounding property first.
Second priority: Protect the walls. Any walls where your home faces a hillside are most critical. If you have fire threat from 360 degrees around your property, install eave sprinklers completely around the entire house.
Critical foundation: Establish Zone Zero. This is the 0 to 5 feet immediately around your house. Remove all brush, decorative landscaping, wood piles, furniture, or anything combustible. Even live plants can ignite and carry fire to your structure during a fire storm.
Simple Evacuation-Ready Systems
For the simplest evacuation-ready system, install a 1-inch ball valve that controls your roof sprinkler system. Whatever water supply you have (municipal, well, or stored), the system uses it when you open that valve before leaving.
The alternative is adding that diesel pump pulling from your pool to at least a 1-inch line feeding impact sprinklers on tripods or mounted to posts around your yard. Position them to hit your roof and the surrounding yard. You can plumb this as a fixed installation. The only action required before evacuation is starting that diesel pump and connecting one hose from the pump discharge to your main system.
The Sensor Problem and Our Solution
The irrigation industry and the fire protection industry have not made sensors or controllers readily available to homeowners. This is a problem FireRoofs is committed to solving in the very near future.
Consider how interior sprinklers work: when there's a kitchen fire, heat rises to the ceiling, triggers the sprinkler head, and water deploys. That principle doesn't translate to exterior wildfire defense. When heat gets close enough to your house to trigger a simple heat sensor, it's often too late. The ember storm has already done its damage.
If you have an engineering mindset, you can install temperature sensors on the exterior of your house. Based on NFPA-72 standards for heat detectors and wildfire research, setting these sensors between 135 and 160 degrees Fahrenheit is appropriate, though you'll need to adjust based on your local climate and typical summer temperatures. The key is setting the threshold at least 20 to 25 degrees above the highest ambient temperature your property typically experiences.
As the fire storm approaches and gets within several hundred feet of your property, rising ambient temperature will trigger your sprinklers. Systems like this have been deployed in Australia and a few other countries. It requires some engineering knowledge, but it's achievable.
FireRoofs' initial installations used temperature sensors on the house to trigger the system. This works as a last-resort, ultimate-measure protection. However, we discovered a critical gap: when the ember storm is blowing in from miles away, the ambient temperature around the property may not have reached your trigger threshold. Embers can be starting spot fires around your property while temperature hasn't reached 150 or 160 degrees. The fire might still be a quarter mile or more away, but wind-driven embers are already landing on your property.
This is why, with our company's reputation on the line, we went back to our engineering team to develop the most advanced, modern sensors available for residential wildfire defense. Our system combines multiple detection methods (smoke, flame, heat, and satellite fire tracking) to activate protection before the fire front arrives, not just when dangerous heat levels are detected.
We want to bring this technology to every homeowner in the wildland-urban interface, whether you're in California, Wyoming, Washington, Oregon, or even internationally. Just this week, we received inquiries through our website from other countries asking if we can install systems abroad.
Our Mission Going Forward
We're a young startup, but it won't be long before you can order a complete kit from our website, possibly even through Amazon, and have it delivered to your door. The kit would include sensors, sprinklers, and controllers. Through our website, you'd be able to design your system, then pay a local contractor to install everything using our designs and components from your local irrigation supply store.
This is our ultimate goal: making wildfire defense accessible to every home. In California alone, there are over 5 million homes in the wildland-urban interface. That's roughly one out of every three California households. Even if FireRoofs completes 1,000 installations per year, it would take thousands of years to protect every at-risk home. We need to get complete systems and kits into homeowners' hands so they can protect themselves.
Not every homeowner has a property valued at $3 million to $20 million and can afford a $50,000 to $150,000 professionally installed system. FireRoofs is with you, and we want you to stay protected. In future posts, I'll share specific designs for smaller, average-sized houses and how to protect them on realistic budgets.
I hope this gives you a solid foundation to start planning your defense system. Our team is small and currently overwhelmed with projects, but if you're ready to tackle a DIY system, drop us an email. After you've done your homework and have your plan sketched out, we're happy to jump on a 5-minute call to answer critical questions and help you finalize your approach.
We're here for you. We love our community, and we want everyone safe, returning home to their family and memories intact after the next fire storm.
I'm Shawn Gardner with FireRoofs. This is probably one of the most important blog posts I'll publish, and I'll keep this series going through Parts 2, 3, 4, and beyond.
Thank you. God bless you all, and stay safe out there.
Ready to Protect Your Bay Area Home?
If you're in the San Francisco Bay Area, FireRoofs offers comprehensive wildfire defense system installations. Book your free home evaluation today to learn how we can protect your property with our advanced sensor technology, roof and eave sprinklers, and Class A foam systems.
Have questions about wildfire defense? Check out our Frequently Asked Questions or learn more about California's wildfire insurance challenges and the FAIR Plan limits.
Contact FireRoofs: Visit FireRoofs.com to explore our complete wildfire defense solutions and discover how we're making professional-grade protection accessible to homeowners throughout California's wildland-urban interface.
Related Resources:
Scientific Sources Referenced:
Calculating minimum safety distance against wildfires at the wildland-urban interface - Research on radiant heat distance and safety zones
NFPA-72 Heat Detector Standards - Industry standards for temperature sensor activation
California WUI Housing Statistics - Property-level analysis of California's wildland-urban interface
US Wildland-Urban Interface Data - National WUI statistics and risk factors
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