I guess they have to make a profit somehow. The mechanical horns always got my attention plus it was also one of my biggest childhood fears in the mid and late 1970’s.
With the way that codes are changing, smoke alarm companies may have to find a cost-efficient way to install low-frequency sounders in their smoke alarms. Kidde has/had a combo smoke/CO alarm that had a voice sounder, so why not drive a speaker to do a temp-3 520hz tone, you know?
The problem with that is, those sorts of smoke alarms aren’t cheap, and unless they’re required for all new residential buildings, electricians will simply install the cheapest ion interconnect alarms they can find. I speak from experience - the FireX detectors we had in our house were pretty crappy.
They should go back to using electromechanical horns. Not only are they louder and sound more urgent, they also have a power frequency which is more audible during sleep. They also seem more durable than piezo horns
will never happen. the code has dB levels that need to be met, as long as the piezo’s meet that, they are considered loud enough.
I agree about electromechanical horns. Piezos may be loud but again the are alot less urgent sounding. Electromechanical horns made you jump 20 feet in the air when they went off and you didn’t stick around with that atrocious noise.
Got one of those Gentex GX-100s that were mentioned before, here’s a video of it. Haven’t hooked it up/tested it yet.
Can’t wait to hear it. Looks like there’s no test button so smoke must be used
Update on the GX-100.
I now own a few rare smokes. I believe i am the only collector to own this style of smoke detector. I have 2 of them.
Those get sent back to the factory because of the radioactive material in them. Some type of old edwards/est detector, we just shipped like 50 of them off.
These are photoelectric
Technically speaking, photoelectric alarms don’t need to be replaced every ten years. They don’t have radioactive americium 241 that decays as time goes on but an infrared LED. This means that they can still be used years and years after they are made. Just my opinion. Ions however do NEED to be replaced every ten years.
I own a similar variant of those. I’ve had it for quite a while.
Don’t forget to check out NLind/FireAlarmFan’s Earli-Gard EGD-41R videos.
Also, there’s a NIB TC49A on ebay now. It’s the no. 1005 two wire version. It has a white base rather than the black one and a different sensor. The cover has a small tab where the LED is. Mine doesn’t have that tab.
http://m.ebay.com/itm/171737175437?nav=SEARCH
Btw, I found a newspaper ad for the Oster smoke alarm. Check it:
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1368&dat=19780922&id=8oBRAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_xEEAAAAIBAJ&pg=2108,4132847&hl=en
Here’s another newspaper ad for the Oster smoke alarm
https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1955&dat=19780418&id=Ut8hAAAAIBAJ&sjid=Y6AFAAAAIBAJ&pg=3598,5019341&hl=en
Those Oster smoke detectors were huge alarms and resembled the Dicon of the same era. Again I take it they weren’t on the market very long. There doesn’t seem to be alot of info online about this or the Dicon.
Can anybody identify this detector? There’s a red LED that’s constant on and a test button. I’ve never heard the one in my apartment go off, but I’ve heard that they can be activated without triggering the building’s system.
20150409_234031 | cl94 | Flickr
These are in my apartment on a college campus. If it helps anything, the building has a Simplex 4005 system, with each individual building being tied into a 4100 (pretty certain) and a Simplex annunciator at the office. In quite a few of these apartments, they’ve been replaced by Gentex photoelectric smokes.
BRK 5919TH. Photoelectric+Heat. Pretty rare indeed.
Thanks. The hallways have old model TrueAlarms and the laundry room has a TrueAlarm heat detector, but didn’t know what the heck these things were. Out of curiosity, could these detectors activate the Simplex 4005 panel?
This complex has a bunch of strange things. Original horns in the apartment buildings were first generation TrueAlerts (some lacking the “TrueAlert” label), but the office building had SpectrAlert classics with 1st gen TrueAlert strobes in the restrooms. Most of the apartment horns have been replaced with SpectrAlert Advances (horn only in the apartments themselves, h/s in the hallways) with a few Genesis and GX-90 horns scattered around for good measure. My apartment has an original TrueAlert horn, but I don’t know if it even works and I assume its days are numbered.