Genesis
The coverUPS® products illustrated on this website resulted from a casual dinner conversation in London, England in early 2008 involving coverUPS® Principal Daniel Neeb and an Examiner for a major international Property Insurer based in the UK. This conversation focused on a significant area of loss in the hospitality industry known as accidental sprinkler discharge, leading us to an inquiry and then to an idea... Why was it that this particularly significant cause of Property Losses had never been examined from the point of view of deterrence? Then came the Ah Ha moment when the idea was born...enter coverUPS®.
Annual statistics show that the single leading cause of Property losses in large residential and hotel occupancies stems from accidental sprinkler head discharge. Why? Because sprinkler heads represent an attractive nuisance. In addition, the signs often placed next to the heads actually increase the frequency of these losses because of people's latent curiosity. As an exposed, but delicate element, found in convenient locations, the exposed head looks like a coat hook - and people consistently try to use the sprinkler heads for just that.
As a result, millions of dollars are lost by the Hospitality industry in the United States every week. We believed it was possible to change that. coverUPS® is the result.
Background
What follows below describes the development of our successfully implemented and on-going testing protocol for the coverUPS® product. We will also describe the background surrounding the development of that testing process.
Initially, we discovered that since coverUPS® was a completely new product, no existing testing protocol was available for us to employ. With over 60 collective years of experience as Architects, we well understood the liability concerns associated with the introduction of a life safety related product in the global marketplace. We also recognized that the only way to instill universal confidence in the safety and reliability of our product was to find accepted, existing test regimens that could be consistently applied to coverUPS® to verify its performance.
We set about developing the testing program for this generic, universally applicable product through close consultation with leading testing authorities, using recognized and industry-accepted methods.
