Reliable Brand Guidelines: A New York Plumber’s 1920 Sprinkler Company, Now Made in Liberty

A New York master plumber and a 1920 company.

Reliable began with a plumber. Its centennial booklet, published by the company in 2020, says Frank J. Fee came to New York from County Monaghan in Ireland in 1889, trained as a plumber in Manhattan and by 1896 ran his own plumbing and heating business on West 40th Street. In 1912 he was elected president of the National Association of Master Plumbers, and the booklet credits him with pushing apprenticeship training as a way of raising the standard of the trade.

Sprinklers came next. The booklet says Fee was designing automatic sprinkler devices by February 1916, was granted his first patent in January 1918 and a second, for a sprinkler with a fusible link, a month later. On 23 January 1920 he formed The Reliable Automatic Sprinkler Co., Inc. Its first model, the Issue “A” sprinkler, was made only in 1920 and 1921, and in 1927 the company placed its first print advertisement, in The Plumbers Trade Journal. Prohibition brought an odd paperwork task: the booklet notes that Reliable needed special permits for denatured alcohol, used to prepare soldering flux.

By 1939 the company had moved to a new building in Mount Vernon, New York, designed by the founder’s son, Frank J. Fee Jr., a mechanical engineering graduate of New York University. The war years followed. According to the booklet, in April 1941 the U.S. War Department invited Reliable to produce automatic sprinkler equipment for hospitals on military bases, and that August Fee Jr. was appointed to a four-person sprinkler industry committee advising the War Production Board on raw materials.

Four generations, and a move south.

For most of its first century Reliable was a family firm. The company lists four generations of Fee leadership: the founder as president from 1920 to 1945, Frank J. Fee Jr. from 1945 to 1976, Frank J. Fee III from 1976 to 2015, and Kevin T. Fee from 2015. The booklet describes Fee Jr. as an officer and later chairman of the National Fire Protection Association, and his sons as long-serving board members of the National Fire Sprinkler Association. Its headquarters stood in Mount Vernon from 1960 to 2006.

Growth came in steps. In the late 1970s and 1980s, the booklet says, Reliable built an international sales team beyond what had been a family sales operation in one New York location, added distribution centres in Atlanta, Chicago and Los Angeles, and in 1982 bought a further property in Mount Vernon. In 1987 it began adding sourced system components to its own sprinklers and valves, and in 1988 its non-production offices moved to Elmsford, New York. The products followed building codes and architects: the booklet says Reliable answered requests for less visible sprinklers with recessed, flush and concealed styles in a variety of finishes. Milestones it names include the GXLO extra-large-orifice sprinkler of 1988, the H22 ESFR sprinkler of 1998, the KFR fast-response link sprinklers of 2018 and 2019 and the Model DDV diaphragm deluge valve of 2019. The company also kept a line of promotional pieces, among them a branded lighter in the 1960s and a figure called “Mr. Rasco” in the 1970s.

The biggest change was a move south. In 2004, the booklet says, Reliable decided to relocate valve and sprinkler production, product development and technical services to a new plant of 305,000 square feet in Liberty, South Carolina; full operation began there in July 2007, and the site was expanded in 2018 to 467,000 square feet. Reliable says it makes all its fire protection valves and sprinklers in Liberty, and that the Liberty site is ISO 9001 certified.

Design and documentation.

Fire protection makers sell to engineers, contractors, insurers and building owners rather than to shoppers, and their pictures tend to show the product at work in a building. A common image is the sprinkler head in close-up: a small brass or chrome fitting, often with a coloured glass bulb, photographed against a ceiling. Another is the pipework itself, grooved or threaded, running in red-painted lines above warehouse racking or through a plant room.

Suppression systems are shown in the rooms they are designed for. Catalogues and project pages picture rows of gas or water-mist cylinders standing in a side room next to a server hall, a control room or an archive, with pipes leading off to nozzles in the ceiling. Detectors and alarm panels appear in the same matter-of-fact way: a round detector head on a plain ceiling, a call point on a corridor wall, a panel with its status lights in a plant room.

Testing and training make up much of the rest of the imagery. Makers and their distributors publish photographs of test rigs, live-fire demonstrations and installer courses, and many list training centres and technical schools alongside their products. Approvals and listings from testing bodies are usually printed on data sheets and in catalogues.

The trade meets at shows. The NFPA Conference & Expo in the United States and Firex in London are among the events where makers set out sprinklers, valves, cylinders and panels on stands for contractors and engineers. The brands in this guide range from privately held specialists to units of large building-technology groups, and their colours, names and typography are set out here as an unofficial reading of how each presents itself.

From family firm to a larger group.

The family era ended in 2024. In a press release dated July 2024, Reliable announced that it had been acquired by Tailwind Capital, a private equity firm in New York, and said there would be no immediate change to its day-to-day operations; senior management changes took effect on 1 July 2024. Tailwind’s own website lists Reliable among its current investments and describes it as a hundred-year-old family business.

Two years later the company joined a wider group. The Hardwire News reported on 8 September 2026 that Reliable Automatic Sprinkler and ASC Engineered Solutions had united as Reliable Safety & Flow Corporation, based in Oak Brook, Illinois, which launched in early September with more than 50 locations across North America and nine international facilities. Contractor Magazine, on 30 September 2026, said the new company combines Reliable’s fire protection business with ASC’s pipe-joining and flow-control lines, and that both companies’ websites would stay active during the transition. Outside the Americas, Reliable says its sales and distribution company for Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific is Reliable Fire Sprinkler (UK) Ltd., with sites in the UK, Poland, Germany, Dubai, Singapore and Australia.

For a design guide, Reliable shows how a plain word and a founder’s patent can carry a brand for more than a century, through four generations and two changes of owner. Compare Viking, another American sprinkler maker, and Victaulic, a maker of pipe couplings used in fire protection. For this guide we use a deep valve red, brass and linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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