Fire protection by building type

Owners don't think in standards. They think in buildings. The question is never what NFPA 96 requires; it's what the restaurant needs to pass its next inspection and keep the insurance carrier quiet. That is the right way to ask. The building type determines which systems are in it, and the systems determine the calendar. A sit-down restaurant typically carries four: hood suppression, portable extinguishers, an alarm panel, and, past a certain occupant load or fire area, sprinklers (the triggers sit in Section 903.2.1.2 of the building code, and the exact numbers depend on the edition your jurisdiction adopted). A dry-goods warehouse might carry one.

Occupancy drives everything downstream

Occupancy classification is the first decision every code makes. It sets which systems the building must have, and each system arrives with its own inspection, testing, and maintenance schedule: sprinklers under NFPA 25 (2023 edition), alarms under NFPA 72 (2022 edition) Chapter 14, extinguishers under NFPA 10, kitchen exhaust and suppression under NFPA 96. Stack those schedules for one building and you get its real calendar: what gets touched monthly, what quarterly, what once a year. The system-by-system version lives at the ITM section. These pages assemble it building by building.

The bar for every page here

Each building-type page has to earn its place. The standard: name at least one requirement that appears nowhere else on this site, cited to standard, edition, and section. A restaurant page that re-shuffles the sprinkler schedule is not a page. It has to cover what owners of that building actually miss, like the NFPA 96 (2021 edition) Chapter 11 rule that exhaust cleaning frequency follows cooking volume and fuel type, not a fixed calendar. Healthcare holds a stricter bar: those pages get written against CMS and Joint Commission requirements directly, from the source documents, or they do not get written.