Industrial operators recognise that many fires begin quietly: a battery cell overheating in refuse, or a drum warming as contents react.
In environments ranging from chemical warehouses to solar farms, such events can escalate long before sprinklers respond or fire trucks arrive.
Fire Rover’s philosophy is the opposite: detect the first rise in temperature, confirm with a trained operator and apply only the water that the hotspot demands before the fire takes hold.
Every installation centers on custom-modified FLIR thermal cameras paired with dual-spectrum flame detectors and smoke analytics.
The cameras read absolute temperature and rate-of-rise, so the analytics can flag a drift of just a few degrees even through smoke, darkness or desert-glare.
Proprietary AI models, updated from the cloud, separate smoke from steam and disregard machinery that runs hot by design, allowing maintenance crews to work without triggering alarms.
When the system detects unusual heat, the incident streams instantly to Fire Rover’s geo-redundant UL 827 Five-Diamond monitoring centers.
In practice, some alerts have gone from first detection to water flow in as little as six to twenty-one seconds – often fifteen to twenty minutes ahead of the moment a ceiling sprinkler head would activate.
Because the system generally intervenes while heat release is still in the 100–200 kW range, the flame never reaches the megawatt intensity required to fuse multiple sprinkler heads.
Automation saves time, but final judgement stays with a human.
Operators drill quarterly on live footage blended with scripted urgencies – lithium-ion runaway, pressurized containers, accelerants – until judgement becomes muscle memory.
Once an alarm is verified, the dispatcher takes manual command of a two-inch hydraulically driven monitor that can sweep a straight stream deep into fuel packs or cast a fog cone for surface cooling.
Flow runs 250–300 gpm, and a typical incident is quenched with less than 500 gallons – less than five per cent of the water discharged when thirty sprinkler heads open together.
Cross-hair overlays show live temperatures so the operator can feather the valve the instant the hotspot collapses; the same console lets them warn on-site staff by loudhailer or call the local brigade.
Across more than 800 field engagements the system has never recorded a false discharge, underscoring the value of the Fire Rover Agent who filters edge-case scenarios that even seasoned AI cannot yet judge.
Field experience now spans more than 800 sites on three continents and a growing catalogue of incident data.
In 2024 the network confirmed 2,910 hotspots, extinguished 268 fires and initiated 358 fire-department calls; roughly half of those events involved lithium-ion batteries.
Transformer yards use the monitor’s forty-five-foot fog reach to cool energised equipment without risking arc flash, while chemical warehouses value the ability to stop a runaway tote before vapour concentrations climb.
At one recycling facility, a rubber feedstock blaze measured at 3,000 °F was knocked down within four-and-a-half minutes, and arriving firefighters almost 10 minutes later found suppression already complete.
On a large metal recycling, plastic/paper recycling, and storage yards, their water tower replacements have snuffed out fires in areas that have very limited fire protection capabilities at their disposal.
The trend is accelerating: Fire Rover expects to manage more than 400 suppression events and over 5,000 confirmed incidents across its client base in 2025, up from 268 suppressions the previous year.
Ceiling sprinkler heads rely on hot air rising over ten metres – a journey that can last a quarter-hour in piled commodities.
By that stage flames engulf roof steel and every head in the design area opens, flooding stock and structural members alike.
Fire Rover reverses the timeline and the volume: water arrives early and only where it is needed, which means less runoff, quicker clean-up and lower business-interruption costs.
Environmental profile is equally important.
FM Approvals has listed the Continuous Flow Primary System under six rigorous standards – FM 1421, 5511, 3810, 3010, 3011 and 3260 – treating detection, suppression hardware and monitoring service as one tested product.
Listed configurations release plain water, avoiding the environmental concerns tied to traditional foam-based systems.
Insurers and governments have already begun crediting the package as a primary suppression method, while design-build teams now reference an FM data sheet instead of lobbying for variances, shortening approval timelines.
Hybrid suppression does not replace traditional sprinkler heads in offices or cable tunnels.
Sprinkler heads still work where heat builds in compartmentalized occupancies.
But in battery stockpiles and remote sites, risk can escalate faster than a fire truck can start its engine.
Combining thermal detection, AI and human response, this approach is becoming standard anywhere ignition can outpace conventional systems.
