Thanx, thought not.
How would a deluge system work?
Pull a cord or handle and the fire extinguishing agent comes out!
In an episode of Arthur called April 9th, there school burnt down but when the alarms go off, it sounds like those really loud march time horns with a continuous bell. Then when they go to the new school someone else pulls the alarm and it’s the same alarm. It was a pretty cool episode, seeing as how it had so much to do with alarms and people’s obsessions with pulling them.
Oh yeah! I remember that episode!! I think those march-time horns are the type of buzzers they use in basketball games, they don’t sound like conventional fire alarms. The bells I’m not sure about…
a deluge system is piped the same way as a wet-pipe system, but the deluge sprinklers are open, that is, they don’t have the bulb or fusible element. just an open hole right to the diffuser.
it’s operated by a supplementary heat or smoke detection system and a small fire alarm control panel. when the detection system trips and throws the panel into alarm, it opens up the deluge system valve via an electric solenoid. water flows through the pipes and blows out through all the sprinklers on the system.
usually on the riser, there’s a small box with a ball valve that says “in case of fire, pull handle”. it bypasses the solenoid valve to trip the system manually.
deluge and preaction systems are very similar, but preaction systems do have closed sprinklers with the fusible elements. this way, the panel’s detectors need to be activated to introduce water into the system, then the sprinklers need to be individually activated. it’s a double-shot system to guard against accidental discharge by breaking a sprinkler or whatnot. in preaction, breaking a sprinkler element won’t flow water unless a smoke or heat detector is activated. a small amount of air pressure is kept in the pipes in a preaction system to monitor the pipes. if the air pressure drops, it means there’s an open sprinkler or a break in the pipes. air pressure switches on the system are connected to the FACP to cause a supervisory if the air pressure drops.
Here’s one in test:
It sounded like an older Federal Signal Vibratone or a Simplex horn being used. These fire alarm horns could also be used for scoreboards. Anyways, it must have been an older system, since it was an older Temporal code (the 60 beats-per-minute one) that was usually used on 1970s fire alarm panels (such as the Simplex 4207). The same goes for Mighty Mountain Elementary.
Another Arthur episode, “D.W. All Fired Up” had a fire drill scene at D.W.'s preschool. The alarm sounded like a regular older-style electromechanical fire alarm horn (it sounded a bit different from the Lakewood fire alarm) also in the old Temporal code. At one part, D.W. was looking up at a bell, and the noise seemed to come from that bell! That was a mistake they made in the animation, I bet. I also heard somewhere that some PBS afflites change the fire alarm sound on reruns of that episode, probably to a bell or a high, shrill tone.
My old school’s fire alarm sounded like that except it was in Continuous.
OMG! No alarm themselves, but JUST on Letterman, Dave was talking about his adventure with a security system going off because of smoke!
I wasn’t paying attention to the beginning, but once I did he was talking about cooking and wearing sunglasses. And because he has the sunglasses on, he’s not realizing that the kitchen is filling up w/ smoke. And so, a detector trips, and sets off the security system (he imitates the siren going off). He then tells everyone: “You know, in my opinion, smoke detectors and fire alarms are a wonderful thing, but you gotta know how to turn 'em off.” His son is now begging for him to turn off the alarm (he keeps asking “Can you turn it off?”), but Dave doesn’t know how. As a result, the FD shows up. Dave tells them “IDK what happened,” and a fireman replies “Well, we smelled smoke,” and Dave said it made him feel like an idiot, thinking they couldn’t smell smoke. Well, the FD couldn’t figure out how to turn off the alarm either, SO it keeps going off for like 45 minutes, and Dave’s wife finally calls and says “Just punch in the the code,” and she gives him the code. He punches it in, and then complete silence. And then Dave gives this look as if to say “That’s it? That’s all it took to shut that off?”.
I hope I can find that online somewhere, because it was FUNNY, and as you can see, I’ve changed my quote to what Dave said about alarms…
Passions:
- In the hospital that Fancy and Sheridan are in, there was an Edwards pull station.
- On death row where Luis is, he lit matches that a guard dropped and held them up to a smoke detector, setting off a tone that went on and off from two projector horns on the wall. A red light where they enter death row was also present.
JUST found out there’s a FACP in Monty Python’s Meaning Of Life:
that could be anything.
Wow man, I was just going to comment on that. Yeah the PBS station that aires here in Mississauga Ontario, Canada is WNED (Buffalo) and I noticed when I first saw the episode it had a horn in it. Just last week it was on again but I noticed it was only a bell in continuous.
Well, we’ll see now, won’t we?
On “Passions”, during the hospital scene where the Harmony Police try to track down the blackmailer, there is a Wheelock MT4-115-WH in the hospital.
FOUND IT!!!
I’m watching the RM Classic Car Auction on ESPN. There’s a white Wheelock E-series speaker/strobe behind the auctioneers.
EDIT: It’s behind the phone assistants (the ones to talk to phone bidders.)
In “Scrubs,” you can almost always see a SpectrAlert in the background. I believe they also have the old-style Edwards pull stations with the flap that pulls out.
In “Passions”, this episode, where a guard sneaks Lancy (Luis & Fancy) into a shower room to make love (but the guard put up cameras so Luis’s jealous ex-lover could spy), you can see a Wheelock MT4-115-WH.