I live in an apartment complex for college students. Recently our fire alarm went off. It was extremely loud and frightening, which caused me to wonder whether the fire-alarm setup we have here is excessive. My Googling led me to this forum, and it seems like you guys are experts on this subject, so I figure you’d be the right people to ask.
The apartment I live in is a string of connected one-story houses with four bedrooms/bathrooms. It’s not a room in a multistory building. If it were, I would expect there to be a smoke alarm in the room and horns/strobes in the hallway. Maybe a strobe in the room, which I’ve seen. That seems to me to be the setup I’ve found throughout my life in apartments and offices and schools. Smoke alarm for personal, intimate areas, and horns for impersonal areas: hallways, large gathering areas.
Our fire-alarm situation, however, is this. Two deafening horns are in the living room, one outside the two bedrooms on the left, one outside the two bedrooms on the right. There is also a horn in my bedroom. There is also a horn in the bedroom next to mine. One bedroom on the other side of the living room, however, has a strobe. The last bedroom I haven’t been inside. The guy’s away. Keep in mind, also, that these bedrooms are the size of dorm rooms.
My life experience, going to school, being in buildings generally, and noticing fire alarms, tells me that this is probably a mistake. Am I right? If so, what do you think I should do?
What you describe here is pretty commonly seen for apartments, dorms, and hotels. The fire code does not require system smoke detection devices inside residential apartments or dorm rooms. If such detectors are to be installed, they have to sound only a local alarm (usually from a horn built in to the smoke detector) and show an abnormal condition at the Fire Alarm Control Panel (FACP), but cannot set off the building signals. Sometimes they are allowed to be self-restoring, however this is uncommon. In most cases, though, they simply install a 120V smoke alarm like in residential homes.
Fire alarm systems are required in the common areas no matter what (or what you called the “impersonal” areas) and additionally, an audible or audible/visual signaling device is required inside each apartment or dorm that sounds with the building system. This is why you have horns in each room of your apartment. Older buildings relied on the signals in the common areas only, as the horns in the apartments requirement had not been implemented at the time of construction.
There was one system I had seen that had a high end addressable system where they installed smoke detectors with sounders in every bedroom and hallway outside the bedroom in each apartment. The FACP was programmed to sound only the sounder bases in that room and alert the building personnel. They also had an addressable control module (basically a small signal circuit that can be individually controlled) wired to turn on strobe lights in the rooms too. The smoke detectors in the lobby, hallways, community rooms, and shared spaces were programmed to sound everything in the building. It is a very complex system and works quite well for the purpose.
So yeah, your setup is not excessive, it is what is required by the fire alarm codes.
You may have a case for the alarm being excessive. Fire alarm devices should be rated for 85 decibels which is the loudest sound that can be heard for a prolonged time that won’t cause hearing damage. If the alarm goes off again have someone walk around the apartment with a decibel meter to see what the sound levels are. From the internet you can download charts that show the equivalent noise producers at certain decibel levels. You can also find charts telling you what time periods are allowed for at certain decibel levels. Of course being in a small room also acts like an echo chamber, intensifying the sound.
Some horns have adjustable decibel outputs. In Canada there is a specific output decibel sound level that has to exceed the ambient(normal) sound level.
It is sometimes common practice to have at 2 alarming devices in a unit with each alarm device being on a different signal circuit in the event that there is a problem with one of the circuits.
Loud sounders:
Down-side = perhaps very unpleasant during a drill.
Up-side = If you are a heavy sleeper, Its loudness may be what saves your life. How many people die every year in their sleep from fires that break out in the night?
Also take into consideration there may be others that are hearing impaired. In locations where strobes aren’t required, the volume of the sounder may make the difference.
Each situation must be viewed individually. In this case extra loud might not be bad if the horns are programmed for temporal mode. Also, the tenants should have their own fire escape plan which should include checking that all residents are out of the unit. This might mean giving a “heavy sleeper” several stiff shoves to try and awaken him to get him out. If he has passed out from toga party celebrations his fellow roomers are his best chance of escape, thus the need for the escape plan. The horn is just one aspect of a safe exit.
1.) use the quote button to quote from a previous post.
2.) The article suggests that by lowering the frequency of the tone, and keeping or even lowering a little the output level a little, it would be more effective in waking the vast average of folks.
The article implies that a voice evac system would be the most effective. Though from experience, a voice evac system really becomes feasible with larger installations.