So my school had a fire drill. Everything worked correctly with the doors, but the alarms were a whole different story.
The alarms in the old parts of the building were not ringing at all(consists of Wheelock and Simplex Motor Bells). The Newest part of my school(which was the cafeteria, music rooms and the science wing) was the only area in alarm at the time. For the duration, only the newer area was audibly and visually in alarm. The newere area consists of EST Genesis EG1RF-HDVM’s(Horn Strobes) in Code 3. I still haven’t figured out where the panel is but this has never happened before so.
Does the school only have 1 panel for all the NAs?
Sounds Like a short in the NAC. Correct me if I’m wrong.
More than likely the old NA’s are run off of an old NAC extender panel or an old FACP that the current FACP failed to activate for whatever reason.
Found the panel. It’s an EST3 and trust me this isn’t the first time my district has had troubles with EST3’s. Every school has one I believe. However I don’t know what had happened in that affair but it was rather strange.
The EST3 is a piece of trash. No wonder they’re having problems.
I’ve never seen one not in trouble…
My school fire alarms have a bunch of weird problems. The East and West buildings have weird panels I’ve never heard of before, and the one in the West building has trouble resetting, and even though the batteries are installed and working it’s in a battery trouble. The portable classrooms have Gentex Commanders on an older Fire Lite panel that doesn’t have any synchronization capabilities and they synced perfectly. Well this year they put in a new portable and installed a Spectralert Advance. The commanders still sync perfectly but the advance is WAY out! I have no way of explaining this.
Are we talking horns, strobes, or both?
The school district canned ours as soon after this past school year ended. We constantly had false alarms, ranging from once to five times per week. The fire department almost always came out every time. They even made it into our yearbook. :lol:
Haha
Huh… This makes me wonder why my middle school took out the Notifier system (that was installed in 2007 for a renovation), and replaced it with an EST3 system one year after the fact… (Yes, that’s right - one flipping year after)
The EST’s can be complicated systems (especially the programming) and really need someone who knows what they’re doing to install, service, and maintain them. If not, then yea, you’ll run into problems and people won’t like them.
More importantly the EST is proprietary and there’s a lot of hatred on these boards for anything proprietary because it effectively removes it from the hands of the hobbyists (and to an extent from fire alarm companies who aren’t dealers).
From what I’ve seen, notifier has always struggled in the larger alarm system market where EST, Simplex, and Siemens (the 3 big “evil proprietary” systems) have always thrived, but I’m not familiar enough with the technical aspects of any notifier system to really get into detail as to why. It might purely be their open strategy, no fire alarm company wants to install a system where a competitor can come in and take all the tenant fit-out work (which is the bread and butter). Even on their website I can only find panels for small and mid-sized applications though.
We’ve replaced a lot of notifier systems in the past, and it was almost always because the owner was unhappy with whoever installed the system (another problem with the anyone-can-be-a-dealer strategy, you get some good ones and some bad ones). So your administration could have just been completely fed up with the installer which left a bad taste in their mouth for the product all around when nothing was really wrong with it.
I find that interesting, but ironically enough, the newer bigger buildings around Sacramento County have mainly been Simplex and Notifier Panels. There is only one Siemens panel in Sacramento (a hospital) that I know of, Fire-Lite is common among smaller buildings and all new schools use Notifier.
The best part is this school alarm technician asked me if I wanted the panel (this thing was massive) and I said no. It never worked right.
I’ll tell you from working for a Notifier dealer that not all your statements are correct.
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Notifier is very similar to Fire-Lite but more advanced. In fact, Notifier’s first large-scale field programmable addressable multiplex fire alarm control panel, (lol long sentence) the AM-2020, was developed by Fire-Lite but they did not want to sell it over the shelf due to its complexity so they bought Notifier from Emhart, who was already an engineered systems manufacturer.
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Small to mid-size – I can guess that you didn’t look over the whole website because it is possible to network the ONYX series FACPs (NFS-320, NFS2-640, NFS2-3030) with a high speed copper or fiber optic network to make huge multi-node systems with more than 10 SLCs total. There’s also a device called an NCA-2 which is a network annunciator used to control all nodes simultaneously and annunciate alarms from all nodes. They’ve also got FirstVision, which is a 19" touchscreen graphic annunciator that shows maps of the building and attempts to predict the origin and spread of a fire based on the order the detectors were activated… As cool as that sounds, we’ve only sold one since it has been released… we made the sales pitch plenty of times but except for that one case, every client has declined it. Most of the time they go with the ONYXWorks computer station.
I’ve heard of some 60+ node Notifier systems in high-rises, which means they can handle large installations. I’m sure there’s hundreds of them all over the country but none around here since we don’t have any high-rises. (Tallest building in Maine is 16 floors… used to have a Notifier system but we lost the contract to an EST dealer, result of a cold call and “deal you cant refuse” kind of thing), however we do some rather large campuses with 5 to 20 node networks.
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“Anyone can be a distributor”… It doesn’t work this way, and I’d love to go into detail but I would be exposing a few trade secrets that would get me in trouble with Notifier.
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Proprietary… Notifier is proprietary, even if it does not seem like it. Other than basic stuff like device adding, modifying, and removing, and simple system settings, the NFS (Onyx) series panels, UDACT-2 dialers, DVC voice evacuation, and the other high end components can only be programmed with VeriFire Tools, which is only licensed to factory trained and certified technicians who work for a Notifier dealer. It is designed so that if it falls into a competitor’s hands it won’t function. They’ve done it so well that if one of our competitors needs to make a modification to one of our systems, they have to call us.
The FireWarden series of panels is identical to the MS-9050UD and MS-9200UDLS panels except for the color. However, there is a code that prevents PS-Tools downloaded from Fire-Lite’s website from being able to connect to the Notifier version of the panel… you have to use a Notifier modified version of PS-Tools which has the same security as VeriFire.
You work with Norris Inc, a small Fire/Security and Communications company. How would that get some “kid” in the eyes of a corporate giant in trouble? What could be “such a threat” in that?
1)Anyone with some extra time, tech. knowledge, and some Notifier parts can crack it. Look at China. Almost everything has been RE several times. So thats a lie. I have talked with Simplex techs complaining how building management has [“F” word of your choice] up 4100s and reprogrammed when it requires the dongle. That seems pretty hard right?
2)I bet if i had the VeriFire tools and a panel, i could use a FreeScale Freedom board, i could get a programer working.
3)If all FACP installs are meant to be done by LICENSED TECHNICIANS, Why are my schools getting crappy install by men who don’t know what they are doing? Same with the "licensed to factory trained and certified technicians ", they can go on eBay, find the stuff, and claim they are certified.
The FireWarden looks nice, but let me guess, the software is extra money. Fire-lite? not a dime right?
Holy crap… No fight, discussion. 
I don’t really understand the need for such a defensive stance against Notifier. Some things in Andrew’s post, such as the fact that Notifier’s equipment is proprietary, really aren’t up for discussion and debate. Just because software/technology, such as Notifier’s software and addressable panels, can be hacked so that an unauthorized person can use them, nobody in the real world is going to do so because it really wouldn’t get them anywhere and is also illegal. I’ve actually heard stories of Simplex coming after collectors because they didn’t have the correct authorization to be using certain technologies that Simplex owns.
Just because you’re a factory-trained technician doesn’t mean you do good quality work, too. I’ve heard plenty of stories about bad installs done by small, independent companies to the biggest ones like Simplex or Siemens. I would bet that the men that work on the systems at your school might be more “generic” maintenance people or electricians that may be certified to work on alarm systems (how do you know that they aren’t, anyways?) and have to try to fix the alarm system without calling in an alarm tech in order to save money. Also, nobody’s going to believe you are certified based on alarm equipment that you’ve purchased from eBay…there are ways to verify the legitimacy of a person’s verification, you know.
I guess at the end of the day, i’m a stubborn, rebellious, hypocritical kid that hates change; You win.
I hope you don’t think that I was implying any of those things… :?
No, Not at all. How could one of my fav. YouTubers do that?