Hello all,
My college is pretty much a Simplex school, with almost all buildings having ES panels: most on-campus buildings have 4100ES, some older ones have 4010s, there’s 1 or 2 4100Us, and the off campus apartments with systems have 4007ES. There’s also a few buildings with Siemens systems - 3 XLS, and a couple FS-250s, each of which have a 4007ES sitting right beside to act as a communicator for the network. There’s also some other cool stuff that’s configured, such as campus wide mass notification using a Digital Acoustics system. The newer buildings also use the more accurate “walk to the nearest stairway and evacuate the building” voice evac message!
The school does its own monitoring via its police station, where I suspect there is a TrueSite workstation. Also, I’m pretty sure that they do their own FA maintenance as well - I’ve seen panels open with tools nearby, and a school facilities truck parked out front but no JCI/SimplexGrinnell service van in sight. However, I think they do bring them in for new installs and larger jobs.
Does Simplex allow very large customers with technicians on staff to get their own dongles/have access to the programming software for 4100 panels? There’s a much larger university not far away from this one and it’s 100% Simplex as far as I know (mix of 4100U and 4100ES) with techs on-staff as well.