Advice on installing indoor sprinklers due to renovation

This remains a sore point for our completed renovation. We installed the sprinklers, of course, because we had no choice. No only was it expensive, it got in the way of some of our building goals. For instance, we have a movie room setup in our garage where they put the riser and other equipment. You wouldn't believe the random sounds it makes. This is not what we wanted while watching a movie.

I don't know about you, but we were required to apply for and construct a separate water line to the house from the street's water main. More permit$, delay$, digging up the $treet and $idewalk, not easy or fun. At the end, you get two separate water bills from now to forever, even if no water runs through sprinklers.

Then there were the false alarms. Due to a radio malfunction by the monitoring company, the alarm went off non-stop for two days! This affected all their houses in their network, so the technicians couldn't help everyone fast enough, and the piercing sounds could be heard by neighbors, who were already angry about the renovation. There was nothing I could do about it, least of all sleep. I don't who cried harder, me or my baby.

For all this, you get the honor of paying the monitoring company cartel a monthly fee twice as much as we pay for high speed internet. Frankly it's criminal. They require you to plant (and pay for) an expensive bomb in your own house and demand payment to keep it on. If you cut wires or try to disable it in any way, the fire department will automatically be dispatched at a fee to you. A great business model for the fire department, a nightmare for homeowners "lucky" enough to do an extensive remodel.

If you can avoid installing a sprinkler system that would save you in your project costs and long-term maintenance.  We reduced our project renovation to 49 percent to avoid this requirement since we have a fire hydrant 40 ft from the house and avoid future maintenance issues.

I want to echo the previous responses on fire sprinklers. We were unlucky enough to submit our building permit plans during a month that Berkeley started requiring sprinklers a few years ago.

We were forced to put them in a small ADU - it cost us $5000 for the sprinklers and thousands more to re-route our water line. We aren't against making things more fire safe but after some research learned that fire sprinklers don't often save lives (in a small building, people hear alarms and leave) but they can be helpful in not having the fire spread to other buildings - that is, they can help with property damage. Our building was far from other structures and basically 2 rooms, so we appealed to the Fire Marshall to exempt us. It was denied ("no exceptions!") and we ended up putting the system in. Then about 6 months later, the city decided it would no longer require sprinklers for the type of project we were doing.

The sprinklers have never gone off and we hope they never will, but we worry about it.  We do get a small discount on our homeowners insurance since we have a system.