Euro here. Here we have many systems using addressable sounders directly off the detector loop. A brand is considered lacking if there is no support of addressable n/a’s. not a single brand in the usa uses addressable n/a’s. before you go say “simplex has addressable n/a’s” they do but not really. simplex has its own seperate loop for n/a’s. you still need to run seperate wires for av’s. we have everything on the same pair of wires. why do you guys not use actual addressable av’s? before you say it takes to much power, first have all av’s led and when an alarm goes off, power lowers for the rest but still functional voltage except the av’s or just run auxilary 24v. also suprisingly notifier has been the first brands to use addressable n/a’s. that brings me to my next point, why do ya’ll all hate led n/a’s. they are superior (in my opinion). we have used them for decades with no fuss, while you guys dislike them so much and arent wide spread. why is it like this?
I think a lot of your questions can be answered thusly: America hates change. I for one however like LED strobes: they offer so many advantages & basially no disadvantages: heck I’m surprised it took us as long as it did to start using them (but then again like I said America hates change). LED strobes are starting to become semi-prominent in the US now though: manufacturers were just slow to change I guess.
As for addressable notification appliances, I might like them if they weren’t exclusive to one brand as a result of their addressableness: the fact that the super-proprietary Simplex are pretty much the only ones to be making them doesn’t help.
On another note, North America as a whole doesn’t use sounder bases the way that Europe does (since most European addressable systems use sounder bases as the NAs): in fact I don’t think sounder bases with strobes are even allowed in the US due to the fact that “they don’t meet brightness requirements”. I for one prefer separate notification appliances though.
i understand, but why not have av’s addressed like a smoke detector. and also here in europe, you can program an addressable sounder just as easy as a smoke.
Many of our larger fire systems use speakers as opposed to horns. I don’t think the technology is there to power strobes, detectors, modules and speakers over the same two conductors.
Plenty of systems in the US have options for sounder bases for addressable devices.
Also, Simplex had a patent on addressable NAC that only expired in 2019, that’s probably some of the delay. UL listing takes a heck of time, afaik at least Siemens is working it.
Yeah, but not only are sounder bases with strobes not a thing here as I said, they’re used very rarely compared to in Europe: heck the only places I’ve seen them used are in buildings like hotels where you don’t want the whole system going off if someone burns toast for example: instead you put a commercial smoke detector on a sounder base in each room & have only those sound per room: if there’s an actual fire however hopefully enough smoke will be produced to drift outside the hotel room & activate one of the traditional smoke detectors in the hallway, thus setting off the entire system & dumping the building.
“Rarely” when there’s more than 5 million hotel rooms in the US, plus dorms, staff quarters, apartments, townhomes, etc.
The general idea is the fleeing occupants hit pull station on the way out.
Regardless, they’re still not used in most buildings like they probably are in Europe: there’s a big difference there.
The reason why we hate LED stuff is because the manufacturers designed (most of) them horribly. The only one I like is the Eluxa. The LED TrueAlert ES and the LED L Series look terrible in my opinion. They took what once were good products and made them look like cheap knockoffs.
That’s technically either up to opinion or just us, since most building owners likely don’t care about the way they look (or perhaps they do, who knows). I’d say that most LED devices don’t look that bad though, aside from the positively weird lens design the Eluxa has.