am i qualified to install fire alarm?

[High Tower]

Standard shopping center I/O setup....Not knocking too much, but is nice to see a zone show up for on the shops panel, indicating centers main panel, instead of just ringing bell with no indication.....Had a great cause & effect in a shopping center once....if shop panel activated, centers panel was delayed for 2 minutes then set off either side adjoining shops, but pulsed all others after a further 4 minutes, all pulsed shops converted to full alarm....was a long code to write

i reckon i could just about manage that code, like you say, not rocket science but quite fiddly to configure.

Ill let you into a secret..........

There is a very well known shopping center group who shall remain nameless, for the purposes of this we will call them "Bestfield", they opened the country's biggest shopping center in 2012 adjacent to some stadium or something, all in time for some big sporting event.......vauge enough?? lol

The fire alarm contractor had only just become a Gent approved installer, and this was their first ever Gent job, possibly the biggest FA system i have ever worked on. 58 panels, 337 loops, 19,000 devices, all networked on domains.

The job was the undoing of this company and sent them under, they royalty cocked the cause and effects up!!!!, the biggest shopping center in the country, and the C&E were one out, all out!!!!! can you imaging the potential chaos!

I contact for the company that looks after it now, and they have an engineer there 5 days a week looking after the systems, i am the visiting contractor that looks after the place and i do all the alterations, installs and repairs.

When the center opened in time for this big sporting event, the system diddnt work and had no end of faults! it took 4 of us a MONTH!! to get the system working and to get the cause and effects right!

 

[tazz]

Oooh I hate those jobs of correcting some one elses cockups

 

[High Tower]

Oooh I hate those jobs of correcting some one elses cockups

Yeah, i agree, first time ive ever known it take a month to correct one tho

 

[Engineer54]

Fire alarms are not rocket science.....but the design is precise and most sparks miss the maths used to complete a functional system.
If we take a smoke detector, with its detection range radius of 7.5 meters, and fit this into a square room, of 15m x 15m it will not actual cover the area, due to the being an a circular detection. So using an overlapping design, or a cross section measurement of 7.5m will give us a standard coverage of 10m x 10 m. There are many variations we use to design a system, height , area, envoiroment conditions and possible risks.
Its a shame really, that there are not many engineers entering the fire alarm industry, and as engineers retire, there is a big gap of cad/fire alarm designers

Even with specialised companies being brought in for design and drawings etc, i've still had quite a few occasions where i've had to send the submittal packages back for corrections. Some of which have been quite bad discrepancies. So it's not always a case of these specialist companies always getting things right themselves...

 

[tazz]

Totall agree, find most of the local council designers to be the worst, missing roof voids, forgetting plant shutdown and always cocking db levels up.
This really should not be the case, fire design is set in stone, and a fire designer should have no excuse when working alongside building contractors