We are Lone Star Fire Extinguisher Co., family owned since 1993. Our shop and parts stock sit on the I-30 frontage in Mesquite, and Plano is a regular stop on our schedule. We book the property, load what the job needs, and handle inspection, certification, recharging, mounting and replacement on site.
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If a Plano inspector marked the extinguisher line on your report, the repair is almost always smaller than the paperwork makes it sound. Findings fall into four buckets, all four same-visit work:
Call us with the report in front of you. We walk the building, service or replace what failed, and tag every unit. Replacement extinguishers, cabinets and signage ride on the truck, so a shortfall found during the walkthrough gets filled on the same visit.
Most cities inspect commercial buildings on a schedule the fire department sets internally. Plano put the schedule in its city code.
The city’s fire inspection program authorizes Plano Fire-Rescue to inspect commercial and industrial businesses on either an annual or a biennial basis, and then says which is which. Under 20,000 square feet with no alcohol served or sold, a business is on the biennial cycle, inspected every other year. At 20,000 square feet or more, or serving or selling alcohol at any size, it is on the annual cycle.
Read that twice if you hold a liquor license. Two identical suites in the same building land on different clocks if one serves and the other does not, and there is no size floor on the alcohol trigger. A very small bar is an every-year building.
We read the fire chapters of eight nearby cities against this one. Some set no interval in ordinance at all and leave it to the department. Some set a single flat interval for every commercial occupancy. None of them keys the interval to floor area and alcohol.
The program applies to businesses holding a certificate of occupancy issued by Plano, and that is the connection worth understanding. The certificate is not only a gate at opening; it is what enrolls the business in the recurring cycle. Plano requires a new one when the occupancy, the business, the business name or the ownership changes, so that enrollment gets re-tested more often than most operators expect.
One caution. The city’s handouts describe the inspection as annual, because most of what it inspects lands in that tier. And a year without a city visit does not stop your tags expiring on their own schedule.
Plano publishes the checklist its inspectors work from, so the extinguisher expectation is a number rather than a judgment call. The commercial sheet asks whether extinguishers have been maintained, and states a minimum of one 2A 10BC unit for every 3,000 square feet.
The multifamily sheet is separate and reads differently. It states that every complex is inspected annually, and gives managers two ways to satisfy the requirement: one 2A 10BC for every 3,000 square feet, or 75 feet of travel distance, on each floor; or a 1A 10BC mounted inside each apartment. Those are two very different purchase orders, and which one a complex runs usually predates its current manager.
Plano also runs a red and yellow tag reporting portal for fire protection contractors, and fire extinguishers are one of the named categories on it, alongside detection, suppression and hood systems. So a deficiency found on a Plano property has a formal channel back to the fire department, and it is worth correcting the day it is found.
The density line is the city’s summary of the national standard rather than separate Plano law, but it is what the inspector’s sheet says, so we size to it. We walk the building, tell you how many units it asks for and where they belong, and supply what is short at bulk pricing.
Plano inspects against the 2024 International Fire Code, effective August 1, 2025. That puts the city at the newer end of the metroplex: of the cities we serve, only Mesquite and Irving are also on 2024, Garland is still on 2015 and the rest are on 2021. Two things in that adoption change what a storage building needs.
So the question in a Plano lease space is not what your business calls itself; it is how tall the stack is and how much floor you have. We walk the aisles, place the fixed units and supply them at bulk pricing.
The size and alcohol rule sorts Plano’s commercial base into three very different jobs.
At the top, the city describes itself as a major employment center with over 210,000 jobs, and its economic development record lists headquarters and hospital campuses from a few hundred thousand square feet to over two million. All of it is every-year work, with unit counts in the hundreds across floors, garages, mechanical rooms and loading docks. That is a scheduled route with a written unit list, not a walk-in job.
Multifamily is the second block, roughly 42,000 apartment units, about a third of the city’s housing, and every complex is on the annual sheet.
The third block gets forgotten. A single lease suite under the size threshold with no liquor license sits on the two-year cycle, and two years is long enough for a tag to expire, for a unit to disappear behind stock during a remodel, and for the person who knew where the extinguishers were to move on. There, the portable is often the only fire protection equipment anybody touches.
One more Plano rhythm. A mobile food establishment gets its fire inspection at permit renewal, the same day as its health inspection, on a permit that runs a year and does not transfer. If you run a truck here, those are one appointment. Have the unit tagged before it.
Every service line runs off the truck at your Plano property, in one visit:
We also stock ABC dry chemical, Halotron and CO2 extinguishers, cabinets, commercial first aid kits and fire safety signage.
Three decades in the Metroplex, licensed technicians on the trucks, and the Brantley family name behind every tag. Branden Cook and Zack Tapp hold state-issued Fire Extinguisher Licenses, the credential behind a valid tag. Jason Brantley, who owns the company, takes the dispatch calls and Robin Brantley runs the office. We bring the stock with us, so what a walkthrough turns up gets handled on the same visit.
Standard on every Lone Star job:
It depends on two things, and the city code spells them out. Under 20,000 square feet with no alcohol served or sold, you are on the biennial cycle, inspected every other year. At 20,000 square feet or more, or serving or selling alcohol at any size, you are on the annual cycle. The alcohol question has no size threshold at all.
Your interval can change. A business that serves or sells alcohol is on the annual cycle in Plano regardless of square footage, so a small suite that was seeing an inspector every other year moves to every year. Get the coverage counted and every unit tagged before that first annual visit rather than during it.
No. Inside Plano city limits the fire code official is Plano Fire-Rescue’s Fire Prevention Section, and the code that applies is the one Plano adopted. County fire authority does not reach inside the city. Licensing for extinguisher servicing companies runs through the state, which is where our technicians’ licenses come from.
Fire and Health both have to pass before Plano will schedule the final certificate of occupancy inspection, and both are booked through their own departments rather than the building inspections system. The city’s guidance is that the certificate has to be approved before you occupy, stock merchandise or open to the public, so an extinguisher shortfall at that stage delays your opening day.
A licensed technician inspects and tags each unit once a year, and your own staff should check gauges and pins monthly. Internal maintenance and hydrostatic testing come due on longer schedules set by the extinguisher type, and those dates ride on the tag. We run annual inspection and maintenance plans that keep the calendar handled.
The same trucks and technicians cover the rest of our service area, and every city runs its own fire code:
