I want to compare 4 brands of institutional type smoke detectors (detectors installed side by side - detectors normally wired to fire panels) exposed to a controled amount of smoke in a controled environment (similar to UL standard 268 room test). I need to monitor the signal from all devices at the same time record activation time. What is the easiest way to acheive this?
A few questions I have:
Can units like siemens fd00t441 be activated without being wired to a panel (like home type commercial detectors)?
If the above is not possible, can I wire 4 different brand detectors to a single generic panel and log the output?
Please note:
I am not a fire alarm tech, so please excuse my ignorance. However, I have a solid background in scientific instrumentation design and installation.
All the units (and panel) would be used only once and never to be used again for real detection purposes.
All the units can be powered and wired seperately if needed.
Most can, but be aware that some (like 2-wire System Sensor i3s) require being hooked to a current-limiting circuit or they’ll be damaged. The Siemens FDOOT441 however requires an addressable Siemens panel as it’s addressable (pretty much all modern Siemens addressable panels are also highly proprietary, making them impossible for non-Siemens personnel to use).
You should be able to provided they’re all conventional detectors (which can work with many different brands of panels unlike addressable ones) & they’re listed for use with the panel you plan to use them with (as damage can occur if there’s a mismatch).
You’ll want to use four-wire (separate power and signal) conventional detectors for this exercise. The good news is that four-wire conventional detectors provide their output signal as a dry contact, so you don’t even need a fire alarm panel to drive them around for this exercise – any old datalogger with 4 dry-contact digital inputs will do, and will likely be cheaper than the >$1k it’ll take to get you a panel with support for a serial output you can capture for datalogging purposes.
(If you do want to test two-wire conventional detectors, or addressable detectors for that matter, you’ll need control panels that are compatible with the detectors in question, which’ll severely crimp you on which detectors you can test together due to protocol incompatibilities.)
Thanks for your replies, very informative. I don’t get to select the detectors, they are already models in use by my client. Are detectors hardwired in 2 wire/4 wire configs (is it a selectable option)?
Not sure what you mean by that first part, but detectors are made either as 2-wire or as 4-wire (& thus unlike with some notification appliances that’s not selectable).
Two-wire smoke detectors are totally different from four-wire detectors. Two-wire detectors get their power from the control panel and activate the panel when their alarm threshold is reached. In the fire alarm industry, detectors must be listed for use with a particular control panel. They are not universal. On the outher have, a four-wire detector uses two wires or terminals for power, and has two separate terminals for the alarm contacts. They are generic and can be used or adapted to any fire panel, or used independently, say to close doors ,drop a fire door, close dampers or shut down an hvac unit. You will have to match a control panel to the detectors your client has.
For the FDOOT441, your best bet (since it’s a Siemens addressable detector) is to get a FC901 (50-point Siemens Cerberus addressable panel) to talk to it.
This does raise some questions though, mostly having to do with latencies. With analog-addressable detectors, it’s often the case that the panel is making the decision on whether to alarm or not based on readings from the smoke sensors. While this allows for sophisticated cooperative-detection approaches, programmable sensitivity, and so on, it does mean that there are polling and panel processing latencies introduced into the timing between when the detector senses the smoke and when the alarm sounds.
Got it. Bad news for me though, the are 2 wire models.
I tried to run 24vdc through the Siemens model following the diagram I found(terminated the end of the loop with 100ohm resistor). And nothing lit up. I was hoping to at least see an LED come on.
The models I have are Mircom, EST, Simplex and Siemens.
It’s starting to look like I will need to get four seperate panels. Bummer.
Since it looks like I will absolutely need panels, can someone on this forum recommend the most basic and inexpensive commercially available addressable fire alarm panels for Mircom, EST (CHUBB-GE), Simplex and Siemens?
Well most of the addressable panels Siemens & Simplex sell nowdays are highly proprietary, meaning they can only be programmed by each respective company’s personnel, but I’m pretty sure there’s a little more leeway with Edwards & Mircom: at present the likely-least-expensive addressable panel that Edwards sells (not that they sell anything but addressable panels now) is their iO64, while with Mircom it’s likely their FX-3318. If you look around you might be able to find usable software for both of the latter panels (which is why I said there’s supposedly a little more leeway with them).