When the alarms would start up, they would have a fourth blast among initially sounding, before resuming in the normal Temporal coding. Anyone know why that happens?
I’ve seen that places too. At my old middle school, they have a simplex 4010 system with truealert and the rectangle ceiling mount version in white horn strobes, in temporal code 3. Normally when the system was first activated, they would do 4-8 blasts before syncing on to code 3. I suspect this is due to the smart sync, because once during a drill, I heard three blasts coming from the other end of the building(I was in a quiet study hall with the door open) before our side fired up. I’ve also seen in yt videos, up one silencing, an extra blast sometimes occurs(also simplex truealerts). One thing that happened weirdly is last year I was there for a family members concert and a kid pulled the alarm but they let us back in before resetting the panel so the strobes were still flashing. Once the system was fully reset, the alarms did like a half blast before shutting off. Weird.
Sometimes its the syncing(On the start up, the end is maybe a NAC quirk…), My school has the same “problem”. I found out that they are two-wire(Volleyball players hit an Advanced in the gym that has no tamper screw…) and you can see the wires. When they installed the system, i got to help set up two SK NAC extenders.(There is around 8 thur-out the building…)
I seriously wanna know how so many people are (or claim to be) able to help with alarm installations. Like, for one it’s illegal for you to do so because you are not certified and have no qualifications, and second, how do you even get access to those sites during construction?
B: Maybe the contractors on the job just weren’t thinking and allowed someone to do a small job under their supervision…just to make a kid happy. I seriously doubt it, but in today’s world you just never know.
One thing is for sure, on most properties I have to visit on the job, I am required to check in and get some sort of ID badge…and that’s for me, a contractor who is SUPPOSED TO BE THERE. So how a minor could wander on to a job site without being escorted off baffles me, particularly on a public job, like a school.
Some of the helpers I get… I’ll hire one of these kids in a heartbeat! As long as they can listen to basic directions! I told my helper today “don’t test the smoke detectors in front of the elevator”. What does he do? Tests the smoke detector in front of the elevator… But then he doesn’t bother to tell me so now the elevator is shut down for 30 minutes before the maintenance guy comes up to me and wants to know how much longer we are going to be tying up the elevator.
It was a replacement at his school, some place he is already allowed to be at, not a construction site. Helping could be as simple as handing parts or reading off the plans to whatever tech or installer is in charge of setting up the panel. You guys are way over thinking this, I doubt he was at an active construction site with a hilte doing some core drilling or something crazy.
We had a problem a while back when we commissioned a system that was installed by an EC and a helper. Boot up the panel and there’s over a hundred troubles – Ground faults, short circuits, missing devices, duplicate addresses… Started pulling SLC devices and found that the helper flipped the SLC loop polarity a bunch of times and wired so poorly that bare ends were somehow touching the J-boxes. Fixed all those, still had lots of missing devices… turns out the helper “forgot” to address nearly every device in the system. After hearing about it, EC later said that his helper was not following instructions…
Unfortunately electricians are never really taught low voltage, gotta find the low volt guys who know the stuff. Ever get an electrician to wire a security system? Oh boy… :roll:
They only see hot, ground, and neutral. Give them a multi-conductor low voltage cable and a wiring diagram and you’ll often run into problems.
I’m surprised one would screw up the polarity though.
There is a fire alarm panel in a local hotel where an electrical installed everything - ran 14/2 Romex for all the devices!
Another fine example was the electrician who decided to run Cat5 for telephone wire. Instead of using blue/white & orange/white for lines 1 & 2, came up with his own color code when wiring to the old color codes on the back of the phone jack:
green = green (obviously)
orange = yellow (looks close)
brown = black (again, loose close)
blue = red (only color he had left)
All the “whites” were sliced together as some sort of “ground”
I bet they had to fulfill a certain AHJ requirement, like 2 fire drills in the first 3 weeks or something like that. Maybe they put it off for some reason, and had to do them on the same day. This has happened to me a few times before.
