So - I think this topic of discussion may have come up before, but Gaylord is a manufacturer of kitchen hood suppression systems and vent hoods. The company is very common in commercial kitchens, restaurants, and basically anyplace that needs commercial cooking equipment.
At one time, Gaylord manufactured a product line called the “Quencher”. If you’re familiar with kitchen hood suppression systems, they’re a type of wet-chemical system that aims nozzles over commercial cooking equipment like grills, ranges, deep fat fryers, etc. The nozzles are all held shut by a fusible link that, when activated, will release the wet chemical over the appliance. Usually there’s also an interlock to shut down the appliance too, to prevent electrical fires.
This fusible link is also sometimes common to the entire appliance, not to each nozzle. So if the link is activated, all of the nozzles above that particular appliance will discharge the wet chemical. The agent is fed from a manifold that’s usually wall-mounted, and is piped to each hood. There’s usually also an interlock for the fire alarm system/sprinkler monitoring panel that’ll activate so that the panel can dial out to monitoring to dispatch FD.
Well, for a period of time in the 1980s (the patent was filed for in 1980 and awarded in 1982), Gaylord developed a system that used what are essentially standard glass bulb sprinkler heads as nozzles, rather than a separate fusible link system. Functionally, they’re sprinklers, but they call them “nozzles”. Ostensibly this method would also allow just the one nozzle that activated to flow chemical, saving more of the chemical, and theoretically causing less damage, or so that each nozzle would be temperature-specific to each appliance. Not a horrible idea in theory, but I can’t speak very well about it in practice. It is no longer manufactured, so take that for whatever indication you will.
I have seen one of them installed in the field before - the sprinklers looked almost identical to a standard-response, intermediate or high temperature sprinkler head, like the one below:
Albeit, the heads were pure brass and not chromed, and the bulb temperatures were observed to be anywhere from green to blue to even purple, indicating intermediate and high temperature ratings.
So - if you have a Gaylord system and it goes off, can you just replace it with a regular sprinkler? Nope! Kitchen hood nozzles must be installed per their listing for their specific use, according to Section 10.2.4 of NFPA 96.
Okay… so let’s buy a “nozzle” for our Gaylord system. That can’t be too expensive, right? I’m sure they still make them for legacy systems just in case something happ-
Eight. Hundred. Ten. Dollars. And fifty-one centavos, baby. Want to hazard any guesses why? I’ll leave that as an exercise to the reader, but I will say that it doesn’t necessarily have to do with this supplier running out of them - though Gaylord does sell them at a slightly cheaper price at $750.47 each.