I for one love Edwards: sure some of their decisions & products may be questionable but besides that from what I’ve seen they’re a lot better than some companies! What’s more they’ve not only been under the ownership of some pretty good parents through the years (General Signal Corporation, SPX Corporation, General Electric, United Technologies Corporation, & now Carrier Global), but they’ve innovated during those years. What other company that you know of makes a multi-sensor/multi-criteria detector like the Signature & Signature Optica serieses? What other company that you know of makes panels with built-in failsafes that actually allow the panel to continue operating even if the CPU fails?
As I have said before, Edwards/EST’s faults are few in number compared to their successes.
Yeah: Simplex was great back in the days of being owned by Tyco (& of course when they were independent as well), but all that went out the window as soon as JCI bought them: since then it’s been nothing but crap.
I’d have to say the Cerberus/Siemens MXL. Never have I worked on a panel more confusing and frustrating. Particularly the fact that there’s a trouble logged for going in and out of trouble on these panels, and you can only scroll one way in the menus. And this is coming from a person who likes the Edwards ESA-2000
wheelock is not the problem, siemens is. to make a long story short, siemens did really stupid stuff and got in a lawsuit with wheelock in 2008 for patent infringement.
From what I have been told it wasn’t the designs of Siemens’ (technically Faraday’s/Cerberus Pyrotronics’) signals that prompted Wheelock’s lawsuit: it was the fact that Siemens (though technically Faraday as the protocol is called “Faraday Sync”) copied Wheelock’s sync protocol almost directly (not sure why they waited until some years after Faraday & Cerberus Pyrotronics had both been acquired by Siemens (1998) to sue though).
As for continuing to use rebranded Wheelock signals, Siemens probably felt it wasn’t worth it financially to restart production of their own devices, especially since they’re in multiple industries besides just life safety (the latter of which they probably don’t consider as important as the others). This unfortunately means that Wheelock’s lawsuit killed Siemens’ unique NAs, which we may never see again (though I’m hoping that someday they feel like being unique again in that regard).
Why shouldn’t I? Their notification appliances were quite nicely designed & definitely unique in some regards, & I for one think it’s a shame that Wheelock’s lawsuit is to blame for their demise. As for Amseco: most of their devices are quite unique in design too: if anything they copied System Sensor more than they did Faraday/Cerberus Pyrotronics/Siemens! (with their ceiling-mount devices at least)
No, the smoke sensor has 2 IR leds shining like n different directions, and a blue led. This allows it to determine the size and color of the particles, reducing false alarms. Apparently they’re pretty slow though