Pam, I am the director of an historic house museum which does have a sprinkler system.  We inherited this system with the house because it had been used previously as a retirement home.  As far as I am concerned the most distressing thing about the sprinklers is the method that was used during installation.  The house is stone with brick interior walls.  Therefore the sprinklers were installed in the 1950 with nearly all of the piping exposed.  We have a dry pipe system which is tested twice a year.  It is tied into our security system and year before last we added smoke detectors tied intothe security system so that if there was smoke in the house we might have warning before things got intense enough for the sprinklers to activate.  It makes me much more comfortable about having the sprinklers.  Ther is a great deal of beautiful woodwork here and we have seven beautiful parquet carpet floors which were installed when the house was built in 1892-5.  I would rather see anything happen than for the sprinkler system to activate - exept for a fire.  I think that we could deal much better with wet than burned!

Don't know if this was the kind of information you wanted.  You are welcome to contact me off list ([log in to unmask]) if you wish.

Good Luck, Elizabeth Stith