Haha here’s one for the books. At my old elementary school before they tore everything down and built a new school. A Simplex 4002 and FCI panel were synced together! The alarm company who only installs Honeywell products decided to wire the new lunch rooms panel in sync with the Simplex 4002, with the Simplex 4002 being the host panel. Turns out because you can’t sync those two panels together without using a special relay. And I guess they didn’t have enough time to wait for that special relay or whatever. And they Form-C relayed both panels together, so that way when one panel went into alarm, it would trip the other panel, and vice versa.
Only problem is… There weren’t synced to reset together. So I remember one day I was home early from MS, and they were doing a fire drill at the ES (which is right across the street) well you can hear the Wheelock horns from the new building going off, and the alarm tone over the PA. And then you hear the alarm tone from the PA shut off, but the wheelocks still going, then the PA alarm comes back on again. Then they try shutting off both panels simultaneously, meaning one janitor at each panel with walkie talkies, counting down. And you heard the Wheelocks shut off, just a hair before the PA alarm goes off. But about two seconds later, both alarms started up again. So they decided to call the students back in. Finally they manage to silence both systems, so strobes are still going in the multi-purpose room, and FYI the simplex system has no strobes added to it except in the bathroom.
Now the Honeywell installers come back to try to fix the problem, which they think may be a bad pull or detector, instead of the connection problems. So they decided to replace a detector, shut off both power to the systems and restart them up. And that did the trick, both panels were back into normal. However, one of the guys must’ve not been looking at the box, and they ended up installing a different brand detector into the Simplex system, which mind you had a different coding for reporting things. Apparently the smoke was normal, but still tripped the 4002, which tripped the FCI panel. Everyone was told to evacuate, and now the mess starts all over again. They decided to dismiss school early, which us residents didn’t find pleasing.
After a couple hours of alarms going off, they finally got a replacement FCI panel for the 4002, which was just temporary. And replaced all the old Simplex pulls and detectors, but kept a relay for the alarm tone to the Simplex PA, which worked fine. And actually they wired the annunciator (old Simplex one) into the FCI panel, and for the first time, it actually lit up. I had never seen it do that before, but it did, they eventually disconnected it. And they did one more test round, this time resetting from the new replacement, and it worked perfectly. So moral of the story? Don’t conduct fire drills with a shoddy system.