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L.D.H. "Love It, or Hate It"
I am wanting to start using LDH in our dept. and am wondering if I can convince the majority into changing their thought process. Let me add that we are in a rural area, and no departments that might provide aid uses LDH. Should we make the switch?
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by PA Firefighter on
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I love it!!! When I started we carried a split load of 3" and 2 1/2 ". We never had enough water at the large calls and we had more hose to pickup and tower. I wasn't a fan at first but using it convinced me. We have been using it since the 80's. Work smarter not harder.
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Permalink Reply by Tyler Stinson on
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Well i would have to say that LDH is a very good thing. I am in a vol fire dept in a rural area as well and we have 1200ft of 4in hose on all 3 pumpers that we have and we love it. We are lucky to have neighboring depts that also carry LDH eventhough they carry 5in hose we have bought adapters so that we can connect to there hose. All of our LDH is 100 ft sections and it is not that difficult to reload onto the truck. I know of one call just over a yr ago that our neighiboring dept put 2400ft of 5in hose on the ground and we put another 1200ft of 4in on the ground and we had plenty of water. So I really think that LDH hose is the best way to go for a supply line.
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Permalink Reply by Ben Waller on
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We just have two firefighters walk our LDH down with a manual double roller device. The firefighters simply clamp the device on the hose and walk it down. A third firefighter holds the hose behind the other two so that the emply hose doesn't slide on the pavement. We don't use a Storz cap to keep the air out - we simply put a double fold at the end of each LDH section and leave it on the pavement until we reload it. Our standard supply bed is 1,000 feet of 5 inch. We also carry 25 ft and 50 ft pony sections.
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Here's a comparison in the friction loss from 2.5 inch, 4 inch, and 5 inch hose...
2.5 inch - 18 PSI for 300 feet, 50 PSI for 500 feet, 128 for 800 feet, nothing above that listed.
4 inch - 2 PSI for 300 feet, 5 PSI for 500 feet, 20 PSI for 1,000 feet.
5 inch - less than 1 PSI for 300 feet, 2 PSI for 500 feet, 8 PSI for 1,000 feet.
At anything over a 1,000 foot layout, the friction loss for 4 inch starts climbing dramatically compared to 5 inch.
Source: Fire & Rescue Field Guide, Fifth Edition by Paul LeSage, InforMed, 2004.
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Permalink Reply by Diamond Chief on
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What publications can you find articles by Shapiro?
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That's precisely why I feel like 5'' is the way to, for those extremely long lays in our area.
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With ya on that one, brother.
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We use hydrant tool bags as well. We carry a LDH thread-to-Storz adapter, LDH spanners, standard spanners, a hydrant wrench, and chemlights in ours.
We're lucky - our three water utility companies have all installed Storz adapters on the steamer connections. That makes our LDH hookups a lot quicker than when we had to carry the threaded adapter on the end of the LDH.
As for painting the hydrants for flow rates, you don't need to paint the entire hydrant.
If you have yellow hydrants, all you need to do is paint the bonnets and caps for the flow color codes.
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Permalink Reply by Cody on
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Let me start off by saying I love the fact that LDH give you alot of water. The only downside is haveing to reload it and do hose testing on it. My dept is also a rural area, and for a long time we were one of the first ones to have 5" LDH. But after showing the other local depts the benefits of using it, it was no time till 4 other depts added it. We use it on just about every structure fire. It's great for those tight places where you can only have one truck on the actual fire scene. So we lay the 5" water main to provide more than adequate water supply. My personal opion for what it counts, I think it's a great asset to have. We use the 100' sections for the most part, but we do have some 50' and 25' sections. If this tells you anything we carry 1800' of 5" LDH on our first out engine. Hope this helps.
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Permalink Reply by ECB on
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We carry 5" on all three of our engines, in 100' lengths. There are (2) 50' lengths on board. We put a 25' length in the running boards on the first due at the pump panel (both sides). Engineer flips it out of the trough its in, and its laid to the hydrant.
I also have a policy that we drive over the hose when reloading it. No more backing up. Driver can see the hose laid out in the middle of the street, and doesn't have to worry about someone getting hurt.
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There was also another Larry that wasn't too shabby on LDH, the late Larry Stevens. He had a lot of techniques that worked quite well I'm told.
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Permalink Reply by Marvin Hawk on
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Love to use it, hate to pick it up, but then who doesn't. If you are the only ones using it I would say you will need adaptors to go from what ever the mutual aid is bringing to what ever you choose as LDH. If you are starting from zero I would suggest 5 in and go with 100 foot lengths. Also for sake of argument I will guess that you now use 2& 1/2 for feeding you may want an adaptor that will allow two 2&1/2 to feed your 5 in.
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