Here’s a tricky one, would love any advice or pointers. (California)
4 story mixed-use building: one floor is parking garage, 2 floors of office, 4th floor has one apartment. The whole building is sprinklered.
Apartment is newly remodeled, with network of FirstAlert smoke/CO alarms. This met residential code requirements.
Offices are being remodeled, with new Potter alarm system with sprinkler flow sensors and will have code compliant horn strobes in the office suites. There are two horn strobes from this system in the apartment.
Our City is asking that alert devices (horn strobes or etc.) for the Potter system be installed in the apartment per standard approach for residences: one in each sleeping room and one in any hall outside sleeping rooms.
Ideally, we’d avoid running a whole new system… it would be awesome (if the City would allow it) to somehow interconnect the Potter network to the FirstAlert network through the orange wire, so an alarm in the office floors would sound in all the bedrooms. FirstAlert sells a relay that sends a signal from their network TO other devices, but has no option for accepting an incoming signal FROM other devices.
I think the Potter system is 24v and the FirstAlert orange signal wire is 9v.
Any creative thoughts on how to try to connect them?
Unfortunately, I don’t believe that there is any way to do this. You will need to do it with full horn/strobe and/or detector coverage in addition to the First Alert alarms. Alternatively, you could rip everything out of the apartment and use detectors on sounder bases if it’s an addressable system.
First Alert alarms (in my limited testing at least) will produce T3 code when fed a continuous signal (5V or 9V with respect to neutral) on their interconnect wire. The problem, though, is that the normal module for generating interconnect voltage (the Kidde SM120X) doesn’t have a battery in it (strange, I know, right?) so it can’t work when the power’s out, which is an obvious dealbreaker. (It’d cost them pennies to integrate battery support!)
That said, while you technically could make it work with a 9V battery & snap wired from neutral to the common terminal on a PAM-SD, sending the NO contact on to the interconnect line, this is pretty shonky stuff – not the least, how are you supposed to remember to change a hidden battery with no low battery chirp to remind you?
I’d recommend just biting the bullet and dealing with the duplication. If you want to go whole hog, (this would be Code even without QuadraSync since you aren’t going to be seeing office strobes from within your apartment, but you have QuadraSync most likely, so you have full license to go nuts this way even if your building isn’t running System Sensor notification appliances), get P2WLED-LFs to hook to the NAC, then put them in SEP-SPSWL-P expanders, and run those expanders off MP120KLs whose 120V power is switched by a First Alert interconnect relay. Set everything to 110cd, and voila! Now you have almost a full hearing/visible accessible unit setup, complete with strobes for your smoke alarms! (No battery backup for said smoke alarm strobes, but that’s not a properly solved problem at this point in time.)
The LED L-Series isn’t officially listed for FWR power, so that might not work.
Is the AHJ requiring the signal to be 520 Hz? If not, another option is to use conventional System Sensor i3/i4 detectors, which might be easier to connect on the existing wires, and provide a button somewhere in the apartment to reset the detectors.
Do you know if the floor between the third and fourth floors is a 1-hour fire rated floor? If it is, then since the fourth floor only has one apartment unit, it is an R-3 occupancy separated from the B occupancies below, which does not require a fire alarm system.
Kidde does offer a similar relay and tests have shown compatibility with both brands. Unfortunately due to how the relays is powered and that Fire alert and Kidde isn’t officially compatible, your only option would be to switch out the alarms. Gentex offers smoke alarms with built in relays to connect to the IDC or NAC of a fire alarm panel. It’s a direct replacement and I think its your best bet. https://fireprotection.gentex.com/files/GN600_S-C-SC-H_Series_FINAL_R1.pdf You’d have to replace the smoke alarms anyway or have duplicate device’s, it’s an unfortunate situation to be in.
The L-Series expander strobes have not been LED-ified – they’re still the xenon versions that work on FWR.
Three problems with this:
You’d have trouble getting them to sound in an interconnected fashion locally if you did this (not sure if the COSMOD can handle it itself but I doubt it can).
The IDC would need to be a supervisory circuit (so your burnt toast doesn’t evac the whole building)
The reset would likely need to be a keyswitch station, which is a problem since duct detector stations are all NO, so you’d need to use a PAM-2 or the likes to “flip” the contact so you have a NC in line for resetting.
Thanks. Short of asking Gentex… do you know if their relay(s) will allow one way communication…. so if the offices have an issue it will get through the relay and sound in the residence, but if the residence has a smoke issue it will only sound in the residence and not get through the relay to the office’s system? (The residence has sprinklers so a true fire will alert the whole building, but I’d hate to evacuate the building for burned popcorn in the residence).
The wiki claims that they were LED-ified in 2023, but it doesn’t look like any source was cited. It looks like @Dr.Exquisite added it in this edit.
I always thought the COSMOD would automatically reverse the polarity of the IDC upon a smoke or CO condition, but I don’t see that anywhere in the manual. It should still be possible to accomplish if the FACP monitors the IDC
Does this lead to any issues or are you just noting it down?
Could the reset be accomplished using a ceiling pushbutton instead? Holding it down would create a trouble on the FACP, but briefly pressing it to silence the alarm would likely not cause any issue since the FACP would already be beeping over the supervisory
The relay only appears to allow the smoke alarms to signal a condition to the FACP, not the other way around. This is one-way but not the way that is needed.
If you have a backup AC generator then you might be able to use that to power the Kidde relay. As far as I know, the Kidde relay is the only one that also has contacts to trigger the smoke alarms. Because the smoke alarms aren’t supervised, I’m not sure if this will be permitted by the AHJ, but all of this is already beyond what the code requires.
There is an input for a NAC and supervision, So you’d just leave the output disconnected. I sent a link in the previous post to the alarms I’m talking about, there’s a few different models so pick carefully. Do note these unlike the previous generation do not explicitly state it’s able to be used with a FACP, I definitely recommend contacting Gentex about your use case.
Where do you see this? Searching for “NAC” on the document yields no results, and searching for “superv” only yields the word “supervision” for the heat alarm contacts, which are meant to transmit a heat alarm condition from the device to the FACP.
The previous generation included both smoke alarms and smoke detectors, but this generation is entirely marketed as smoke alarms, so I don’t think they are meant for use with an FACP.
The previous generation only were smoke alarms, the series before that (so 2 generations ago) did have both smoke alarms and smoke detectors that were also able to work with inputs and outputs from a FACP. I’d believe they’d keep this feature at least to retrofit the previous generation.
I think the NAC interface is referring to the relays on that diagram, since those could be used to switch on a NAC that is wired through the relay. The wiring diagram itself does not show any wires that could be used to trigger the smoke alarms, since the Form A and Form C contacts are all for transmitting the smoke/CO condition somewhere else (e.g. to an FACP), not the other direction.
In this notice, Gentex stated that there would be no replacement for the smoke detectors from two generations ago due to a declining market. I don’t think the previous generation could receive an alarm from an FACP based on what I said above, so the current generation presumably doesn’t either.
Again, thank you all. Gentex support says “Our Smoke Alarms don’t have any inputs for remote activation. Some of our Smoke Alarms do have relays customers use for monitoring but they are more of an output, not an input.” Oh well.
