What are YOUR favorite fire alarm brands, notification appliances, and pull stations?
My entry:
Brand: Honeywell/System Sensor & Simplex
NA: Sys Sensor SpectrAlert Advance (hence the username and image)
Pull station: BG-12 & T-bars
Polls may be coming!
My favorites are:
Brand: Eaton/Wheelock
NA: Eluxa or Exceeder series
Pull Station, T-bars and BG-12
@Kai_Bannon Nice! Good choices. By the way, Wheelock absolutely has to be weird, so the Exceder is spelled differently. Apparently, they thought it would be a good idea to make people thing the fire alarm would feed you Excel documents. (Excel + feeder = Exceder)
I just love their new LED notification appliances and their voice evacuation systems have the clearest script out of the others. Although their owner Eaton does seem to be quite weird.
Favorites:
NA’s: Simplex 4903-9838, Wheelock NS, Wheelock 7002t
Smokes: Simplex TrueAlarm
Pulls: Simplex T-Bars, Siemens
Brands: the Honeywell family(US), Gent (EU), Jade Bird Fire (CN)
NAs: System Sensor Mass, S-Quad smoke/heat/horn/strobe combo, JBF-4372e2
Pulls: All sorts of T-bars
Brands: Fire-Lite, Silent Knight, Gentex, and Wheelock
N/As: anything Gentex and Wheelock
Pulls: Fire-Lite BG-12L and Simplex 4251-20
Favorite brands: notifier and gamewell
Favorite NA: system sensor MASS
Favorite pull station: gamewell century
Notification appliances: Gentex (mainly because they’re basically the only ones still making 4-wire devices)
Panels: Silent Knight (going by my experience with their SK-5208, though just the same a lot of other brands’ panels aren’t bad either)
Manual stations: Simplex (mainly due to their easily-activatable & just-as-easily-resettable t-bar, particularly their 4251-series which is of better quality than their current 4099-series)
Smoke detectors: System Sensor (gotta love the i3, which is usable on virtually any system & for virtually any application given all the different models of the i3 System Sensor sells!)
Brands: Simplex and Honeywell
(I love Honeywell more though because of their keypads)
NA: Commander series and Simplex TrueAlerts
Pulls: Bg-12’s and Simplex T-Bars
Favourite brand: Gent (pre-Honeywell)
Favourite device: Gent 34770 optical smoke/heat sensor sounder (released in 1997, discontinued in 2019)
Honeywell kinda ruined all of the products from the companies they bought
Heck yeah @Alex_Wilkinson, they even ruined one of their UK fire alarm manufacturer subsidiaries which is Gent, a company that has always been based in Leicester, England and has been manufacturing fire alarms since the days of Chloride Gent.
FCI too, they got rid of the MS-6 and MS-2. And Gamewell. They got rid of the century and anything that used the Apollo protocol. Now everything is the same, but with different brands
Flipping heck, if I was able to, I would acquire Gent from Honeywell and bring back the original Gent Vigilon System 34000 and the Gent 34770 optical heat (optical smoke/heat) sounder.
In fairness, the s quad is pretty cool
Compared to the likes of Eaton & Johnson Controls I didn’t think that was really the case, but given more recent developments like Notifier’s Inspire-series (that has paywalls of all things, something that should not be in life safety) & Honeywell prioritizing their name over their brands’ in the new logos for the latter (or heck even using only their name in some cases), I’m starting to think that they’re not much better than Eaton or Johnson Controls.
Care to elaborate how exactly Honeywell has supposedly ruined Gent?
I agree that the Century, MS-2, & MS-6 all should have gone on, though from what I’ve read the MS-2 was made by another company separate from FCI who shut down production of it some years back, hence why it’s no longer made. As for that last part: I guess it just makes sense if they’re all owned by the same parent company to make everything consistent (even if doing so is somewhat redundant).
At this point someone oughta try to acquire the poor companies suffering under the ownership of their parents & try to change them for the better: enough is enough (mainly Wheelock from Eaton, Autocall, Simplex, & Grinnell from Johnson Controls, & Notifier, Fire-Lite, Gent, Gamewell-FCI, Silent Knight, System Sensor, Farenhyt, & who knows how many others from Honeywell (heck because of how many companies the latter owns wouldn’t they be breaking numerous antitrust laws?).
Gent had a history dating back a few centuries and were well known for creating the Gent Warbler fire alarm sounder which another British fire alarm manufacturer called Protec copied
Yes, but none of that tells me why you think Honeywell ruined them.
Really? And to think that everyone points to China first when it comes to knockoffs/copies…
OK, Honeywell launched an S-Quad without the Gent logo on it, now considering how long Gent has been around for and their history of manufacturing fire alarm devices and systems, they almost effectively tried to destroy the history of Gent