A Salmon Arm man thinks he has an innovative way for people to protect their home from wildfires.
Bryan Coffey calls his design the Water Winger – a mobile sprinkler system which he says can easily be pulled onto a roof with a rope instead of using a ladder.
Coffey says he got the idea after the 2003 McLure-Barriere wildfire.
“The ashes were falling onto the roof, bunching onto the ridges and then sliding down onto the ground and bouncing off the wall, because it’s always windy when these fires blow in,” he said. “I thought ,’Well, geez, if we could just keep that roof a little wetter, it would keep those ashes, which I was desperately afraid would be turning into burning embers at any minute from sliding off the roof.'”
Coffey says he used stainless steel to increase durability of the Water Winger, but to also reduce the risk of damage both to the sprinklers and the buildings.
“We use a ball-chucker to throw a weighted ball which isn’t quite a tennis ball. You throw it over the roof and it’s attached to a very strong arborists’ line. We can get it over roofs over a 100 feet with this apparatus,” he noted.
“Now this line – 100 feet – will do most two storey buildings, but if you need to go a little bigger than that, we can hook it up to this fishing reel set up that we have and you can get well over 150 feet of distance with it.”
Coffey adds he tested several prototypes before his final design was ready last month.
“We sold the first ones to the structure protection crews last year, and they’ve been training with them and they’re ready to go. They’ve put them onto all sorts of different structures including shipping containers and tall roofs and rock piles and log piles.”
He admits he wasn’t anticipating the kind of demand he is seeing from homeowners.
“Right now they are about $1,000 each,” he says. “It’s not just the sprinkler you are buying, there’s a sophisticated deployment line system that goes with it.”
You can check out more information and videos of the Water Winger at www.waterwinger.ca
(Photo via Bryan Coffey)
