Mass Notification

Fire Alarm General Discussion
1

With the advent of LED strobes, why haven’t we seen a device that can flash clear, red, amber, green, and blue behind one lens, and will we ever?

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2

Some Industrial warning lights can flash red, amber and green behind one lens.

3

There needs to be a strobe-plex with 5 strobe colors, and different marked bezels like the l-series/ehs-*l1

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4

And then you get an RGB full-color strobe

5

The only problem with all of them being under one lens is markings.

6

For mainly two reasons,

  • Since all 5 flash colors are coming from the same unit, Many people that are unaware of which flash means what event is happening, and will be confused and may not respond to the alarm correctly in an emergency, which may be deadly.

  • Like you mentioned, Labeling the multicolored strobe may be very hard, and you would need to have 5 labels on one unit, and it would probably not look pretty and would cause confusion.

Remember, Mass Notification Devices are designed to alert people of situations that could be possibly deadly. Those people need to properly respond in an orderly manner to stay alive. If the device alerting the person is confusing, it could have drastic consequences.

And if something like this did happen in a building, the building owner would Definitely Sue you.

7

The question really comes down to what does the code require.

In the current 2022 edition of NFPA 72, section 24.4.17.3, visual notification appliances used in combination fire/Mass notification are required to have clear or white lenses, be marked with either “ALERT” or no lettering at all, and be visible to the public.

In the NFPA 72 handbook, it talks about amber strobes possibly conflicting with other visual alerting appliances in the room, and an analysis should be conducted to coordinate this.

In Department of Defense installations, this is further guided by UFC 3-600-01, UFC 4-021-01, and ECB 2018-17. Without getting too technical, you can think of UFC 3-600-01 as a “building code” and UFC 4-021-01 as a “fire alarm code”, both of which only apply to DoD facilities.

Per UFC 3-600-01 section 9-18.6.3l, visible notification appliances must be provided with a clear lens (ie clear strobe) marked “Alert”. The use of “Fire” is not permitted.

UFC 4-021-01 specified amber strobes in addition to clear strobes in Army and Air Force installations per section 4-6.2.3, but per ECB 2018-17, this has changed to no longer allow amber strobes.

Part of this comes down to the testing standard for visible notification appliances, UL 1971, only permits white light strobes. There are some amber strobes that may meet this listing, but it’s not always a given, and it varies from manufacturer to manufacturer.

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