Well first off, good to be back on here after a couple of years. So I finally got my hands on my friends old MS4 and some i3s removed from a retail jobsite I worked for about three months modding an old ESL system to a DMP with System Sensor LED L Series.
Everybody who owns a Fire Lite panel after 2000+ has the usual maintenance light, whose job is as defined from this quote in the MS2/4 manual, “A yellow LED for each zone that blinks to indicate that a I 3 smoke detector on the corresponding zone is dirty or in need of maintenance. It turns on steady when the Acknowledge or Alarm Silence
button is pressed”.
With that in mind, I thought I’d document my really pretty experimentation just to find a way to light up the 4 extra maintenance LEDs that usually never light up on my panel for others to have an idea of how to do it as well. If anybody here has a for sure idea on what exactly send the maintenance signal to the panel over the wires (not what triggers it) that’d be cool. I’ve had an ADT 5050s pull that triggered it when I pulled it not sure if it was a special way but I found the 4.7K EOL to be hardly making contact with the terminal on the negative side.
Having tested this with two 2W-B’s, both tested via button & one with real smoke, setting the zone to a SUPERVISORY and setting the panel dipswitch #1-7 to AUTORESETTABLE SUPERVISORY, and 5 minutes of the detector being in alarm is what seems to be the formula to getting your maintenance light. The panel triggers maintenance for that zone, and the i3 goes into initialization as if it was power cycled which makes sense since it’s auto reset.
However, the manual states that the maintenance light is supposed to sound like the supervisory alarm which is 1/2 faster than the slower trouble one, which is what I get upon the previous testing method. Not sure if it has different piezo tones depending on severity.
Well, that’s how I got my maintenance light. Any other stories or lore would be great to hear on the matter.