commercial fire alarm

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Talking on loop sounders it is a grey area, but the idea is the isolators should protect would like to see this proved in real situation. BAFE like the a local sounder to the panel at the start of the loop or wired direct to the bell circuit. Issue with XP95 had sticking switches on devices before now, prefer Hochiki especially when fitted high level, then code can be changed without getting up there to replace tag

 

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Good story on morley-ias and advanced as they were the same directors/company at one time.
Must admit you can`t go wrong with morley good all rounder. advanced/ kentec the same.
not too sure on c-tec panels zones and text not displayed at the same time. VA/PA and disabled refuge you cant go wrong with Baldwin Baxall system cost a bit more, but speak clarity (or RASTA level) are second to none along with their to tech support. Oh yes speaking of Morley the old IAS trident back on the market sold as Global by Portugeese company

Yes - known issue on C-Tec analogue panels - we don't use them at all.

I recall Advanced setting up setting up way back too, and everyone hinting that the MX was just going to be another ZX! More Syncro like overall I thought.

That said, totally agree about Morley - it's always been fit n forget in terms of setting up - bullet proof mostly, and you know there's not going to be any real problems out of the box.

Cost wise - the Eurotech badged Advanced stuff seems pretty good, and I'm beginning to enjoy the Nittan stuff too - protocol wise, it has a lot of the best bits of both Apollo and Hochiki.

Ah, the days of the Trident and Juno/Junonet. I don't miss trying to get non_IAS kit to work with some of those jobs! Still got an ultrasonic remote control somewhere though

Global took over pretty well where IAS left off with those panels, concentrating mostly on the Juonet stuff ISTR.

Always had pretty good experiences with Baldwin kit - it's a cost thing as you say. We've used both Omnicare and Vigil kit previously.

 

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remember working in Royal mint. had 4 tridents networked and PA/VA, suggest sooner or later the panels would fail and lockout as they always did. On yearly building power down mantanence, all panels crash, O&M listings out of date, renewed with 4 morley`s and was left with no text only device numbers, there to say the next 6 weekends was a 100% test of all devices to idenify locations

 

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Fun days indeed.

Had my share of that too - and especially missing O&Ms, out of date, or missing zone charts, and as you say triggering or dropping one device at a time, to find out what it's actually identified as at the panel....then finding tons of looped out devices nobody bothered recording. Not so bad on a fifty or sixty device system, but when the device count runs to thousands (and split across several panels in some very creative ways) a different story. Many a weekend/night lost to that.

It reminds me though, of the first ever "cause and effect" system I worked on.

The cause and effect was determined by a fifteen foot by ten foot board of relays. It worked amazingly well, but stuff changing a device or the C&E because something else had changed in the building. That was a mission and you could lose a day or more in the relay room easily. Especially finding out things like why a simple change of MCP suddenly started bells ringing four floors away!

Looking back, it was all fairly simple "If" "Then" logic, but staring at over 500 relays on a board with immaculate panel wiring for the first time was, indeed, daunting. Working on it for the first time, doubly so. Device isolation was an art too.....if it wasn't a case of isolating one device in situ for a short time. In those days we often had to double up as fire wardens too if we'd disabled any of the devices.

 

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good thing is relays are generally very reliable, as to fire wardens would still advise if panel is isolated or request staff in building to be aware, just an arse covering thing.
Cause & effects, good one I had with sprinklers in Coca Cola, as you know isolation of a zone renders detection only, all call points, and input devices are still opperative under bs, problem was on testing sprinkler once a week all 20 sprinkler zone input units went straight into fire. In the end I used xp95 I/O units with all outputs programmed to event 9, event 9 was programmed as an input from a keyswitch. All I/O`s were then wired to open circuit the own inputs with the relay placing and EOL resistor in circuit. the keyswitch now isolates to sprinklers when tested.