Good morning, we are currently doing an annual fire alarm inspection on a 12 story hotel that has a Notifier NFS-640 with the larger LCD display. During audible testing on the 7th, the voice evacuation system worked, but none of the strobes went off on that floor. All other floors function correctly.
We removed a speaker strobe combo from the wall and remove the positive leads that go into the strobe, and it induced a trouble at the panel for that circuit.
Any advice on how to troubleshoot this? There is a booster panel located on the fourth floor, and I have attached a picture of the LEDs during its alarm state. If you look at the board in the middle, those red and black wire terminal outputs at the top changed to 24 V along with the LEDs that are lit up. The LEDs that are not lit up below, the terminals had a change in voltage from 5 to 15. Is this normal?
I’m definitely not a Notifier expert, but I don’t think those outputs are actually active. My recommendation would be to connect a device directly to those terminals and see what happens, and/or connect the circuit that isn’t working to a working circuit to check it. That card may need to be replaced, or it could simply be a programming issue.
When you lifted the strobe circuit in the field, did you document the module #? That will tell you which output on which card that circuit is wired to. That floor may have multiple circuits or not. When you get the module # you can look at the addresses on the cards. The card only have 1 address but the subsequent addresses are also part of the card.
For example, if the card in the middle is set to 50, output 1 is 50, output 2 is 51…ect.
At least that will give the wires. If you see the LED from that circuit on card go green in alarm, you know its programmed correctly. The output should be 24VDC in alarm. The white and black wires are the 24VDC feed wires to the card. Those should always have 24VDC.
If there’s 24VDC on the feed and the green LED for that circuit turns on in alarm, the card is probably bad.
It’s possible there’s some programming error on the panel, if you’ve ruled out anything related to hardware/wiring.
Those control modules should give a trouble if they’re not getting 24 VDC power, or if there’s a short/open circuit. If possible, you should check the CBE (zone programming) on those circuits to see if they’re programmed to only activate for certain zones. You can look on the LCD display under read/alter status.
It’s also worth checking any other troubles to make sure there’s no disabled circuits for whatever reason.
When you activated the test for the seventh floor, the display should indicate any General Zones tied to the activation. You can look in the program to see what modules or boards are tied to that general zone. Most likely the stobes are fed from a booster power supply and removing a wire should give you a trouble. Trace that trouble to the power supply and the module or board that trips it to see if its active during the test.
We went into the programming and manually activated the 7th fl strobe circuit (L02M058) via “Control On/Off”. This successfully activated the strobes on that floor. We also removed the terminal for that circuit (T6) on the booster’s card and it induced the correct trouble. From the LCD programming, everything looks normal. Is there something we are missing here?
If youre messing around with a highrise voice evac system, to be safe, i would recommend to hire a Notifier dealer to upload that program and evaluate it. It might be that output thats programmed incorrectly or may be the input/initiating device you used to cause the alarm that may be programmed incorrectly. Either way, if 1 is wrong, there may be others.
I would find a way to explain that to your customer and have the whole program looked at.
That’s definitely the right thing to do if they aren’t perfectly confident in their abilities, even if it’s not a high rise. With the amount of circuits shown, it’s probably a large enough system to warrant calling a qualified Notifier technician.
I agree with the other comments about checking the actual program with a laptop. there is one more thing you can check. When you initiate an alarm for the seventh floor, the display should show the point address and any general zones that are associated with the alarm. Then you can check L01M058 to see if it has the same general zone listed. There are several methods to link inputs and outputs but that is the simplest.
Do you know that the seventh floor worked properly in the past? Has anyone been monkeying with the system that could have changed the program?
